Opinion Express View on Bihar protests: Patna challenge
Protests over teacher recruitment point to widening gap between rising expectations and a political economy that cannot keep pace
With people of Bihar going out in large numbers to study and work in other states, it is also an acknowledgement of the need for the state, in turn, to show a large heart and keep its doors open. 
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The death of BJP leader Vijay Kumar Singh has cast a pall over the protests in Patna sparked by the Nitish Kumar government’s policy of teacher recruitment. Even as they unfolded in a fraught political context, the protests have drawn attention to the larger and long-simmering issue of inadequate job creation in the state.
They picked up after the Nitish cabinet’s decision to roll back its December 2020 announcement that had made domicile a mandatory requirement for appointments of teachers. That is, domicile provisions have been scrapped in order to widen the pool of candidates, attract better and specialised teachers. Of course, the reason may also have been political — the new policy is in line, it could be said, with Nitish Kumar’s vaulting ambitions and his pursuit of a national profile in the run-up to 2024. Whatever the reason, however, and despite the anxieties it appears to have stoked among job-seekers in Bihar, the government’s relaxation of domicile policy is welcome in a country with growing rates of internal migration.
With people of Bihar going out in large numbers to study and work in other states, it is also an acknowledgement of the need for the state, in turn, to show a large heart and keep its doors open.
Unsurprisingly, the BJP, as the main Opposition party, has avidly fished in troubled waters. A call for the resignation of Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav, after the new chargesheet filed by the CBI against him in the alleged land-for-jobs scam, was added to the protesters’ list, where it sat somewhat awkwardly next to the demand for regularisation of teachers appointed through Panchayati raj institutions and urban local bodies.
The BJP, till recently part of the ruling alliance with Nitish’s JD(U), and which has ambitions to win the state on its own, has arguably been on the look out for a reason to mobilise and agitate. For the Nitish government, though, the problem runs deeper than an aggressive Opposition. The fact is that even though Bihar ranks among the states with the highest growth rates — according to the Economic Survey, in 2021-22, it posted a growth rate of 10.98 per cent — its unemployment rate at 6.5 per cent, was higher than the all-India figure of 4.4 per cent, and the youth unemployment rate was even more steep at 20.1 per cent as compared to 12.4 per cent nationally.
Those figures tell a story of why the recruitment of government teachers repeatedly becomes a site for scandal — in economies that do not offer abundant or adequate job opportunities to their young, it all too often becomes the centre of irregularities and scams, as in Bihar now or West Bengal earlier.
The onus is on the Nitish government to manage the rising aspirations and expectations in the state. Having presided over Bihar’s turnaround from the days when law and order was its most pressing problem, dwarfing all others, the challenge for Nitish is to take the next step, widen his policy and political repertoire. He has little time to lose.
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