CTEP: First steps into Bihar

This is one of my old pieces, from my first trip to Patna in September before the elections.


I landed in Patna at 8 a.m. and almost immediately start drawing parallels with the Lucknow. I have never been to Bihar before this but have travelled in Uttar Pradesh a little bit. In my mind I am expecting Patna to be more or less like Lucknow. To me I have set expectations very low! I was obviously not prepared for what I saw!

This is an interesting time to be making a trip to Bihar. The state assembly election dates were announced not a week ago. Nitish Kumar has headed the State for a decade now, and the outside world has portrayed him as “the best thing to happen to Bihar” in a long time. But in this election, he for the first time contests without his old times allay, BJP (or the NDA) and has joined forces with the man he first came to uproot (Laloo Yadav). I can feel the intensity and the excitement in the air, almost as soon as I land.  Patna is plastered with huge hoardings of Nitish Kumar and Narendra Modi.

I travel from the airport to Gandhi Maidan, through one of the most important roads as of now, this road has all the major party offices on it. And even though its too early for the crowds of political aspirants to come, one can see the remnants of yesterdays activity. The roads in Nitish’s Patna look good and well maintained. But as soon as I mention this to my driver, he is quick to tell me, “Laloo ke raj main yeh sab kuch nahin tha. Lagta tha dihat main gadi chala rahe hain”  which would roughly translate to …During Laloo’s reign none of this was here, it felt as if we were driving on village roads.

After hearing this completely unsolicited endorsement of Nitish Kumar’s governance, I am hopeful that my conjectures may not be completely unfounded.  During the day, I crisscross the city meeting some of the people that will help me with my study. They all tell me the positives that have happened during Nitish Kuamr’s period. But as I am moving from one place to another, I see a bit of Patna. Its not Lucknow, there is more poverty and less of everything else.

The most important shopping destination in Patna is pointed out to me and I look at both sides of the road expecting to see big neon signs and the big commercial brands we see everywhere nowadays. But no, I am being shown a building with some old boards hanging loosely from its sides. It reminds me of my childhood, of the local markets in Delhi. That Delhi does not exist anymore, but it is still the current Patna. There is something I feel is missing from a growing state capital. There are no big glass buildings that we now associate with corporate offices. I don’t see any buildings with names of MNCs or even our own Indian companies anywhere.

One of the last things I saw in Patna before I headed back to the airport was a stark reminder that I am going to be working in one of the poorest states in the country.  We were driving alongside one of the flyovers that Nitish Kumar has built. I was now used to seeing these around Patna but what I have not seen anywhere else was what was under the flyover. Bamboo and blue plastic sheets divided the entire area under the flyover into 10 feet by 10 feet homes for the migrant Bihari. There were not just a few as we see under some of the flyovers in Delhi, but this was an entire slum, housing definitely over 2000 people under one flyover. Nitish Kumar may have built the road, there is still a long way to go, to bring the absent business and sustained and inclusive growth to Bihar.

But none of this is the actual reason why I was in Patna. I was in Patna to talk about women’s empowerment in Bihar. Nitish Kumar has won many accolades for his Mukhya Mantra Balika Cycle Yojana. This was one of the first few programs implemented by the Nitish Kuamr government; it provided cycles to all girls when they enrolled in secondary school. It was remarkably successful. Now one can see girls regularly riding bicycles to school in rural Bihar. But this is not just a point about increased enrollment, girls on cycles will not happen unless people feel safe about letting their girls go out. A man I spoke to put it very clearly, when he said “ab dekhiye, choti choti bachiya cycle par school jati hain, Laloo ke time main to beti ko ghar se bahar bhejne main dar lagta tha, cycle kahan chalati”…Now you see little girls riding bicycles to school, during Laloo’s time we were scared to let our girls go outside, how would they ride bicycles?

This program was started in 2006, now the first cohort of girls would be in their early 20s and would be looking for work (if they finished school) and would also be eligible to vote. The initial scheme was followed by 50% reservation for women in the local panchayat elections and 50% reservation for women in the hiring of para-teachers for the schools. Now the government t is proposing a 35% reservation for women in  the police force. So basically the girls who finished school now have opportunities to join the labor force. This is one type of empowerment, trying to make them financial independent.

However, are these girls becoming more confident and independent?  The Bihar elections may throw some light on that. Nitish Kumar has for the past 10 years nurtured an electorate that has not been tapped into by any political party either in any state or at the national level. We are talking about the 50% women in the electorate. Though we have many women leading political parties, Sonia Gandhi, Mayawati or Jayalalitha, they or anyone else has never systematically worked to gain the trust of this segment of the electorate.

One potential reason for the neglect of this group may be that in India, most women either do not vote or if they do vote then they would just vote for the same person as their husbands, fathers or brothers. They have rarely exercised their independent choice in this matter. This election in Bihar may show us that women have freed themselves from the choices of the men in their lives. If they choose to vote for Nitish Kumar surpassing the caste and religion barriers then they can themselves single handedly bring back Nitish Kumar to power.

We might see that Nitish’s cycles has given the women of Bihar the independence that we have not seen anywhere else. But irrespective of the outcome in November we will go into the field to test