In Bihar, the wait for a new governance model

Back in 2010, I, like scores of development researchers and policy wonks, was a frequent traveller to rural Bihar.

- Yamini Aiyar

The joke was that if you wanted a job in “development’, all you had to do was to stand in Patna’s (then rickety) airport. There were no fancy hotels, malls or highways, but Bihar was abuzz with possibility. “Sushasan Babu” — Nitish Kumar — had won a landslide reelection.

Credited with freeing Bihar from the dark days of “jungle raj’, his second term held the promise of transformation based on a politics that married social justice with material progress. Women were at the centre of this promise through a triad of path-breaking interventions from enhancing access to education (every morning as we set out to administer our surveys, we would be greeted by uniformed girls cycling to school), Jeevika (a network of women’s self-help groups; every village I went to had a recently appointed Jeevika Didi serving as a much needed conduit between citizens and the bureaucracy), and enhanced representation through 50% reservation in local governments. Long before Narendra Modi, Nitish Kumar had recognised the power of women as a mobilised political constituency.

By 2025, the rickety Patna airport, has transformed into a glittering 21st century one, alongside malls and highways but the promise of sushasan (good governance) has faded into the sunset.

Slowing economic growth alongside the lived realities of entrenched unemployment, price rise, and corruption, are a daily reminder that sushasan stopped short of unleashing an economic transformation. In 2025, hope has been replaced with discontent.