How is Nitish's latest CoM different from his others?

On November 20, Nitish Kumar took the oath as the chief minister of Bihar for the record tenth time, the highest for any chief minister in India. Along with Kumar, 26 other ministers were also administered the oath of office on Thursday.

- By Nishant Ranjan

To be sure, the current strength of the Council of Ministers (COM) is lower than what it has been in the past and we will likely see more ministers being sworn in later. This, however, should not stop us from analysing the latest CoM on various aspects. How is Nitish Kumar's current COM different from his previous ones? Ideally, one should have asked this question vis-à-vis all COMs Bihar has had, but a gap in data availabilitythere is no official list of Bihar's CoMs between 1977 and 2005prevents us from doing this exercise. HT has created a database of Bihar's CoMs between 1952-77 and all CoMs post 2005. While a larger historical comparison of Bihar's CoMs will wait for this data gap to be fulfilled-which HT will eventually do by consulting other sources - it is useful to compare the profile of Nitish's cabinets themselves. Here is what the data shows.