It’s refreshing that the public discourse today in poll-bound Bihar is centred around jobs. Early in the election campaign, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav sensed the desperate mood of millions of unemployed youth and signalled that his priority was to provide 10 lakh jobs. Chief Minister Nitish Kumar expectedly mocked the poll promise as being ‘unrealistic’.
But ironically, the CM’s ally, the BJP, was forced to counter the RJD by promising 19 lakh jobs in its election manifesto released on October 22. The other intertwined issue in the Bihar elections is that of migrants. The state, a traditional supplier of migrant labour to the rest of the country, saw 25-30 lakh workers returning home from locked-down cities to save themselves from starvation.
Bihar, under CM Nitish, has made strides in infrastructure development, but unemployment has always been a huge concern. According to data from the Union Ministry of Statistics for 2018-19, joblessness in Bihar had risen 3% to 10.2% for the year ended June 2019, as compared to the slowing of unemployment from 6.1% to 5.8% for the rest of the country. More recently, after the lockdown, the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) said Bihar’s unemployment rate had risen to 46.6% in April 2020. This is almost double the national unemployment rate of 23.5% in the same period.
It is therefore no surprise that the twin problems of local unemployment and the influx of jobless migrants has taken centre stage now. Poll contestants have been raising other issues like the BJP taking credit for abrogating Article 370 in Kashmir, or Nitish’s JD(U) drumming up Bihar’s ‘growth story’ over the last 15 years. But these diversions seem to be falling by the wayside.
Young people are demanding answers to bread-and-butter issues. Others want accountability, pointing to Nitish’s promise in 2005 that the poor would not need to migrate outside the state. That’s how it should be. Nobody expects Tejashwi or the BJP to provide lakhs of jobs in a jiffy, but it is a step forward that Bihar’s elections are seeing a debate on real issues.