Dr. Manoj Dash, Bhubaneswar, 23 November 2025
The recently concluded elections conducted for the Legislative Assembly of Bihar has resulted in a landslide victory for the NDA group of political parties. The scale of victory was so big that it has been able to trigger a bitter rift in the political family that controls the RJD—the strongest among the MGB’s political allies in Bihar.
Different opinions have been expressed by experts who keenly follow elections and political dynamics in the country. My views on Bihar elections as an ordinary watcher are as follows.
The Keynesian Connect
“The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead,” wrote John Maynard Keynes in his 1923 work, A Tract on Monetary Reform. Though rarely quoted in full, it is the very utterance for which the great post-World War-II economist is both best known and most damned. Economists all over the word have been debating the real meaning of his oft-quoted statement ever since. There is no settlement reached yet on the core message that Keynes must have had in his mind while writing about the prerequisites of monetary reform in an economy going through a crisis.
However, I find a striking resemblance between what Keynes had said and the single most important factor that has played a role in shaping the outcome of Bihar elections of 2025. It is now well established, as well as an accepted fact, that overwhelming support by women contributed to the resounding victory of NDA group of political allies. We also know that Bihar is not doing very well economically and people from Bihar are often found in all parts of the country providing different services and doing all types of jobs. This was a prime point that Prashant Kishore of Jan Suraaj Party has been highlighting ever since he started touring all parts of the state to find direct political significance for himself. Employment to one member of every family in the government was also promised by the Chief Ministerial candidate of the MGB and the de facto head of RJD, Tejashwi Yadav.
Inversed Good Governance Model?
The government headed by Nitish Kumar has made a spectacular come back with a much bigger haul for his party JD (U). It has been twenty years for Nitish Kumar as Chief Minister of Bihar and he is known as the man who symbolises good governance. Indeed, Nitish Kumar has remained only a symbol of good governance, without delivering what good governance should have delivered to people of Bihar in a span of two decades. If he had put governance on the top of his agenda, Bihar would never have been languishing with a multi-dimensional poverty rate of 33.76% as per the NITI Aayog’s National Multidimensional Poverty Index of 2023, which was the highest in the country. The overall unemployment rate in Bihar was 3.9% in 2022-23 which was higher than the national average of 3.2% for that year. However, unemployment rate among youth aged between 15 and 29 years was until recently hovering around 17% in the state. A large majority of the State’s population – about 88 per cent – live in rural areas where the infrastructure that enhances experience of daily living for citizens is disappointing. The current percentage of urbanisation in Bihar is 15.3% against the national average of a little over 36%.
A research study by Dr Pushpanshu Pandey of Bhagalpur University in September 2024 finds that approximately 70% of households in Bihar are classified as impoverished, consisting mostly of small-scale farmers with land holdings of less than 0.5 acres. The productivity is sub-optimal, yielding a mere Rs. 4500 per hectare in storm affected conditions, with a food security period of 3 to 5 months relying only on own assets. This is the reason why substantial number of them go to various regions of the nation in search of work. A significant amount of paddy is produced in Bihar since a large number of farmers cultivate paddy for their own use. However, the present level of proficiency in rice cultivation here is just 2 to 3 metric tons per hectare, which is one of the lowest in the nation.
Coming to women in Bihar who stood solidly behind Nitish Kumar in the recently concluded State election, a study published in June 2024 states that the Labour Force Participation Rate (LPFR) for females in Bihar stands at 22.4% in both rural and urban areas combined. Nonetheless, this figure remains starkly disparate when juxtaposed with the male LFPR, which registers at 74.6% in the state.
A recent study on status of employment among women in Bihar states that in rural areas, the proportion of self-employed workers increased substantially from 35.2 per cent to 84.8 per cent between 2017-18 and 2023-24. Conversely, there has been a significant decline in regular salaried workers, from 27.9 per cent to just 3.6 per cent, over the same period. A similar trend is observed for casual workers, whose share has also decreased, from 36.9 per cent in 2017-18 to 11.6 per cent in 2023-24. Increase in self-employment often means disguised unemployment and under-employment when people lose their earlier regular employment status, which seems to be the case for women in Bihar. What else could be a more plausible reason behind Bihar’s per capita income of only INR 60,337, while the average per capita income in India is INR 1,88,892?
Even when it comes to population control and safe motherhood, Bihar still fares poorly. Out of every 1,000 births, 23 children die. Similarly, 104 women out of every 100,000 pregnant women die during childbirth. The fertility rate, i.e. the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime, is 2.8 in Bihar. This is the highest in the country.
Bihar’s Women and the Keynesian Prophecy
There is little doubt that the Keynesian statement, “in the long run we are all dead,” has elevated the status of the “temporariness of present” to that of “permanence of present” ever since it was coined by the great economist. It has been one of the most influential and enduring ideas of the post-war West. The controversial but ever-green idea of Keynes was especially resonant in the 1992 US presidential campaign slogan of William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton that appetites were to be quenched here and now! Coined by noted Americal political strategist James Carville and extensively used during the Presidential election campaign of the ever-flamboyant Bill Clinton, the much-maligned term “it’s the economy, stupid” still continues to stand as the motif of the reckless pursuit by too many western governments of short-term prosperity at the price of long-term pain, which sowed the seeds of the current world economic crisis, following the banking collapse of 2008 in America.
The essence of the famous Keynesian term was first experimented at home by Naveen Patnaik in Odisha to garner support of women through tactical cash transfers that easily got transformed into votes and multiple successful returns to power. Women in Odisha are ever more dependent on small cash doles and the electorally super-productive tactic of Naveen Patnaik has just got replicated in the recent Bihar elections. However, the idea was essentially Keynesian in nature and women being the managers of their own household economy certainly got attracted by Nitish Kumar’s last-minute transfer of INR 10,000 to 7.5 million women’s bank accounts. Sporadic and small money transfers have never met their intended objectives and only money doesn’t play any role in transformation of women from ordinary housemakers to micro-entrepreneurs. Apart from money, women need freedom from patriarchal norms, business development skills, a conducive entrepreneurial ecosystem, and a host of other factors to grow their business and empower themselves. An earlier Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme targeting education of children in Bihar failed to meet its basic purpose because most funds from the DBT meant for meeting students’ needs were instead directed towards basic sustenance of the families that received monetary assistance.
In spite of his controversial statement that accorded primacy to the present over the future which is often labelled as the long-run, Keynes played a crucial role in the Bretton Woods negotiations of 1944 that underlined allowing sufficient freedom to national governments to pursue their goal of attaining full employment and other desirable social policies. The negotiations led to the creation of two futuristic international economic institutions – the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) which is one of the two key components of the World Bank. These two iconic institutions stood testimony to the success of Bretton Woods System that was seen as a cornerstone of a sound economic world contributing to post-war economic recovery and stability. IMF and IBRD continue to play a significant role in economic recovery and development of many low and middle-income countries including India.
In contrast, what this sumptuous parting gift of Bihar’s women to Nitish Kumar and NDA is going to achieve?
What Awaits Women of Bihar in the Long Run?
The choice of women voters has already played its part in electing a new government which resulted in continuance of the same people in the saddle in Bihar. The quest to satiate the needs of the present—the NDA block’s urge to capture power in Bihar has been met. The women of Bihar have also got their doles and they must have spent the money on Chhath Puja and such other temporary needs. Will real transformation happen to brighten the economic future of their families? Will the aspiring youth of Bihar receive employment opportunities in their own state? Will sons and daughters of the women beneficiaries be imparted skills that would help them build sustainable careers? Will women’s health get prioritised in Bihar? Given the track record of Nitish Kumar’s governance model, these transformative results are very unlikely to be realised in the coming five years.
