Bihar: How Industry And IT Hubs Can Decongest Chhath Puja Special Trains

Every year, during Chhath Puja season, Non-Resident Biharis (NRBs) face a harsh reality: confirmed tickets remain scarce on IRCTC even months in advance. At the other end, airfares to Patna and Darbhanga soar three times higher than those for Mumbai routes, leaving even middle-income migrants struggling to afford their Chhath Puja homecoming.

These exhausting and expensive journeys, repeated year after year, highlight a deeper question—why must millions of Biharis continue to live their lives in two geographies: one for work, another for home? 

It leads to two inescapable questions that go far beyond festival travel.

First, can Bihar ever transform into an industrial state, boasting textile clusters like Tirupur in Tamil Nadu or automobile and pharmaceutical hubs like Pune in Maharashtra?

Second, why can’t cities such as Patna, Bhagalpur, or Darbhanga develop software parks and IT corridors like Bengaluru or Hyderabad? 

With the Bihar Legislative Assembly election in sight, these two queries—rooted in everyday life—have become a major political issue in a state that has seen the most intense form of Mandal politics since the 1990s. 

The Jan Suraj Party, mentored by Prashant Kishor (PK), is raising this issue in almost every public meeting. PK is consistently travelling to every region of the state and has centred his campaign around the promise that no Bihari would be forced to leave the state for employment after a government of his party is formed post the assembly election in November. 

The state government led by Chief Minister (CM) Nitish Kumar has also promised one crore jobs in the next five years. Industry minister Nitish Mishra has released the Industrial Investment Promotion Package 2025 to attract big-ticket investment in manufacturing.

These announcements have further consolidated employment as the top issue in the Bihar election campaign, which is a healthy departure from the binary narratives of Mandal-Kamandal politics and ‘Jungle Raj’, a term used even by the Patna High Court to define the state of affairs during the tenure of Lalu Prasad Yadav and his wife Rabri Devi as Bihar Chief Ministers. 

Current State of the State Economy

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has his fair share of credit. Under the Kumar-led NDA government, Bihar’s contribution to National GDP has seen a remarkable uptick. While, between 1990 and 2005, Bihar’s share in national GDP dropped from 3.4 per cent to 2.2 per cent, under Kumar, the corresponding figure increased to 2.7 per cent in 2013 and has plateaued since then. 

The share of the manufacturing sector in state GDP tells a similar story. It declined from 10.3 per cent in 1991-92 to 6.7 per cent in 2005-06, partly driven by the separation of Jharkhand in 2000. In the next fifteen years, the manufacturing share increased to 9.9 per cent in 2020-21, but slipped to 7.6 per cent by 2023-24. 

The per capita income of the state was only Rs. 9,287 in 1991-92 and slowly increased to Rs. 14,600 in 2005-06. The current per capita income of the state in 2023-24 is Rs. 36,333, which is an increase of 149 per cent, but still the lowest in the country when compared in absolute terms. 

According to Dr. Prachi Mishra, head of the Public Policy Department at Ashoka University, Bihar’s current per capita income is comparable to that of Liberia, one of the poorest African countries. The state significantly lags behind its counterparts in economic growth and development. More importantly, the gap has only widened since then. 

The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), 2023-24 data, shows that 54 per cent of people in Bihar are still engaged in the agriculture sector, while the share of manufacturing in total employment is only 5.2 per cent. 

Mishra writes that Bihar urgently needs an economic plan with a strategy to seize its demographic dividend and spur economic growth and development. 

High Potential for Economic Transformation 

According to the Population Projection Data published by MHFW in 2020, nearly 50 per cent of India’s demographic growth during 2011-36 is projected to take place

in UP, Bihar, Maharashtra, West Bengal and MP. Bihar alone will account for 14.5 per cent of this demographic dividend. 

Given this demographic advantage, combined with skilled manpower and the presence of top education institutes, Bihar’s economy can be nudged to move towards industry and high-value service sectors such as IT and ITES (IT Enabled Services). 

In terms of the availability of factors of production – land, labour, capital and technology – Bihar has all that it takes to power rapid industrial growth, especially in the IT and ITES sectors. With more than 10,000-acre land already available with the industry department, the government of Bihar is set to acquire another 10,000-acre land with a statewide distribution. 

For manufacturing units, water availability through the perennial river systems of north and south Bihar creates an ideal situation to set up their plants in order to leverage the strong market base of the eastern and north-eastern part of India. 

By virtue of it being the youngest state, labour is abundant and skilled workforce employed in other states would be happy to relocate, provided the government commits to improved infrastructure and a safe living environment in the state. 

Union Budget 2025-26 has provision to support Global Capacity Centres (GCC), which are offshore units of big multinational foreign companies, in tier two cities. Bihar can leverage the same to develop IT and ITES growth clusters within different parts of the state. 

Capital and technology are highly mobile and can be easily attracted with the right policies for promoting the setting up of enterprise parks. Industrial Investment Promotion Package 2025 is the right step in this direction as it promotes big-size investment with free land allotment and interest as well as tax subsidy in lieu of creating employment. 

With a higher supply of affordable land and labour, Bihar provides a comparative advantage in manufacturing such as the textile sector and helps to reduce industrial cost—a much-needed reprieve to Indian industrialists amid the ongoing tariff wars between the USA and the rest of the world. 

The reduction in cost would put downward pressure on prices and inflation, which in turn would improve the cost advantage of Indian goods over Chinese outputs, ultimately boosting demand for Indian goods in both domestic and global markets. 

With vast river basins and high-quality agricultural outputs, the agriculture-based industries have a natural advantage not only over the hilly north-eastern states, but also vis-à-vis Nepal and Myanmar. It is beyond doubt that an industrialised Bihar would be the gateway of the east for Made-in-India products. 

Until 2000 when Jharkhand was carved out of the state, Bihar had a strong industrial base with Jamshedpur, Bokaro and Dhanbad as three important industrial cities. South Bihar is still at arm’s length from these industrial cities, which makes it viable to establish industrial corridors such as Patna-Ranchi, Gaya-Jamshedpur, Aurangabad-Dhanbad and Aurangabad-Bokaro. 

Given the locational proximity to the mineral-rich state and the highly penetrated railway network connecting Bihar and Jharkhand to the rest of India, especially with Bay of Bengal harbours, the supply of raw materials and industrial outputs to and from Bihar is not a major bottleneck. 

Train is important, but so is Industry 

When the NRBs return this Chhath with the hope of finding employment within the state in the next five years, they will shape the future of the Bihar economy through their voting choice in the upcoming election.

What they also hope is that the newly introduced trains continue to run, decongesting the crowds inside, and that their parcel vans also carry goods manufactured in Bihar to various parts of India. 

The message should be loud and clear that it is not just trains, but Bihar also needs industrial ecosystems and IT hubs to provide local economic opportunity that is a means to achieve a dignified social life for its people.