How To Win Over The Biggest Votebank

On June 2, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar announced 33 per cent reservations for women in the state’s medical and engineering colleges, marking another watershed in his determined push to empower women in a state where patriarchal mores have held sway.

- Amitabh Srivastava

Women already account for a third of these seats, and with these reservations will most likely outnumber the men in Bihar’s technical campuses.

This will be quite a feat for a state where female literacy is just 60.5 per cent (against the national average of 70.3 per cent), according to a 2018 ministry of statistics and programme implementation survey, and where over a thousand cases of dowry deaths are reported every year—1,127 in 2019, according to an NCRB report. Two days after the technical institutions move, the chief minister asked the police brass to ensure that all the 850-odd police stations in Bihar had adequate women police officers. Women cops now make up 25.3 per cent of the force in Bihar (35 per cent posts are reserved for them).

In February, when deputy CM Tar Kishore Prasad of the BJP pres e nted the 2021-22 budget, it was announced that unmarried girl students would get a cash award of Rs 25,000 for clearing the intermediate exams and Rs 50,000 after a bachelor’s degree. “These measures will encourage parents to send their girls for higher education, and also curb underage marriages. The social impact will be path-breaking,” says Tar Kishore.

Dr Nawal Kishore Choudhary, former head of the department of economics, Patna University, says “these steps also make political sense, as women now play a key role in the electoral battlefield. But it’s not all about politics, the pro-women measures have led to them becoming more assertive, forthcoming and participative in almost all fields of activity in Bihar”. However, Choudhary points out, Nitish has not shown a similar resolve to encourage and empower women leaders—the JD(U) has just one woman among its 16 Lok Sabha MPs. The party fielded 22 women candidates in last year’s assembly poll (six of whom won).