Bihar: The Cycle-Girls, Empowerment and Elections

Today is exactly five years to my first steps into Bihar for CTEP. Today I am posting a piece I had written before the Bihar elections this time    

The year 2005 saw a regime change in Bihar. A new government came into power and some of their first measures were related to law and order and education, with a special emphasis on improving the status of girls in the state. One such flagship program was the Mukhya Mantri Cycle Yojana. In this program, every girl who enrolled into school for class 9 was given a cycle. The idea was simple. Secondary schools were further apart and we could not bring the school closer to the girls but we could make it faster and cheaper for them to reach the same school. Given the situation in 2005, it was a miracle that this program was implemented with little-to-zero corruption linked leakage. 

But the bravest thing was done by the girls of ages 13 to 15 years who took the almost unheard of step to ride out of their homes and cycle to school. Interestingly, this is not the first time that women have used the cycle to show that they are ready to take things into their hands. It happened in the 1800s in the US, when women took the bicycle to break out of the restrictions on their movement.  Again the girls of Bihar, almost 150 years later, have used the same symbol of personal mobility to bring about unprecedented change in Bihar. 

Within a few years of the cycle program starting, more girls completed class 10 in Bihar than had ever done before. Now 15 years later, many cycle-girls have finished school and have also gone on to college. 

During my research-related surveys in Bihar, I met some of these dynamic young girls. A few of them have left indelible marks on me. Two young cycle-girls had progressed to college and were the first in their family to do so. However, like many others, they have to take a private bus to the nearest town for their college. Their parents could not afford the bus fare for them, but this did not discourage these aspiring and enterprising young girls. They had taken tailoring classes earlier to garner new skills. Now they decided to put these skills to use and started teaching other girls in their village. Doing this, they not only earned enough money to pay their fees and their bus fare but also helped other girls in the village acquire vocational skills. 

These girls who have brought about the first wave of change in Bihar, are now in their twenties, and they have aspirations of becoming independent working women. They want to work and are willing to work hard. Another girl I met would wake up before dawn every day to train for the police academy exam, which she hoped to take in a few years’ time. 

But economic growth remains sluggish in Bihar and the only jobs available are in the public sector. The announcement of reservation for women in state police (and other government jobs) by the Bihar government during the campaign for the 2015 election was seen as a welcome move. This was also seen as a way to cement the vote of the cycle-girls who in 2015 would have been voting for the first time. However, given that government jobs are fewer now, this is too little. A lot more has to be done to boost economic growth in the state, so that the aspirations of this young generation are not squashed. It is election time again and the government faces a strong anti-incumbency this time. How will Nitish Kumar ensure that the women who helped vote him into power in 2015 will continue to support him in 2020?