Union Budget shows how easy it is to bluff Bihar

“In all my years in Parliament, this is the first time I have had the opportunity to listen to the Bihar state budget in Parliament,” read a tongue-in-cheek post by DMK MP Kanimozhi on 1 February after the finance minister presented her eighth annual budget.

The post was seen by 4.5 lakh people and was retweeted 2,000 times. At least 9,700 people ‘liked’ the tweet.

Newspaper headlines and TV news also made much of the ‘big push’ received by Bihar in the election year. ‘Bonanza for Bihar’ is what TV anchors also sought to project. The budget did not receive a euphoric or celebratory response from the state, however, which should worry the BJP.

Most people in Bihar appeared to have seen the announcements for what they are — a lot of hot air, signifying nothing, despite the finance minister invoking Bihar six times in her budget speech.

In July 2024, the Union Budget had announced a special allocation of Rs 59,000 crore for Bihar. Nitish Kumar and the JD(U) had aligned with the NDA in January 2024 after briefly flirting with the opposition INDIA bloc. The Rs 60,000 crore allocation in July was seen by many as a ‘just reward’.

The BJP certainly needed the support of those 16 JD(U) MPs in the Lok Sabha to form the government for the third time and the ‘kursi bachao (save my chair)’ allocation — as the Opposition described it — did not come as a surprise.

The allocations were meant to finance three new expressways, a power plant, a two-lane bridge over the Ganga at Buxar and ‘heritage corridors’, besides new airports and sports infrastructure. They were also to fund irrigation and flood-prevention schemes in the Kosi river basin.

How much of these funds have been released thus far is unknown. In any case, it is far too early to see any progress on the ground.

However, if past experience is any guide, they are likely to remain on paper. Remember PM Modi’s boast about the AIIMS of Darbhanga and Madurai?

In February 2025, the finance minister appears to have offered the state yet another bonanza, with an eye no doubt to the assembly elections due in November 2025. No figures were mentioned this time but the budget speech made a grand gesture, promising the formation of a Makhana (Fox Nut) Board, new greenfield airports, the expansion of IIT, Patna, finance for the West Kosi canal project and the setting up of a ‘national’ food technology institute.

The Opposition in Bihar were quick to point out that a makhana research centre has already been functioning in the state since 2001; that the Bihta airfield mentioned in the budget speech has existed for more than half a century; and that Bihar has several agricultural universities, the oldest ones set up in the 1950s in Bhagalpur and Muzaffarpur.

“Please do a Google search and see if a makhana centre is already there or not,” said RJD MP Manoj Kumar Jha when asked to react on the budget proposals.

Anupam, president of Yuva Hallabol and a Congress spokesperson, claimed that some announcement or the other had been made in the past 10 union budgets on promoting the makhana or lotus seeds grown in parts of Bihar. “We know exactly what the situation is on the ground,” he quipped.

Just last month, in January 2025, Giriraj Singh, the union minister for rural development and panchayati raj — who is the BJP MP from Begusarai, incidentally — was asked why Bihar was denied a textile park though he had just announced seven of them for other states. He parried the question and admonished the newsman for asking ‘negative’ questions. It was the same union minister who had declared before the 2024 general election that Bihar would be turned into a textile hub.

Cynics and spoilsports recalled PM Modi’s assurances on reopening the sugar mills in the state. The prime minister had famously promised in Motihari that he would ensure that the sugar mills, shut for the past four decades, would reopen. He would return, he promised, to sip tea sweetened by sugar made locally.

In 2015, he had equally famously offered a special financial package of Rs 1.25 lakh crore to the state, a promise which was never fulfilled.

Indeed, his government has persistently refused to grant the special category status to Bihar that has been demanded repeatedly by Nitish Kumar.

New Delhi has similarly ignored the demand to declare Patna University into a central university.

What is more, the prime minister had announced in 2019 that Patahi airport in Muzaffarpur would start receiving commercial flights soon. Six years later, the project is yet to take off.

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Despite its fertile soil, Bihar is saddled with subsistence farming as the livelihood for many, with the relatively more prosperous farmers transporting grain all the way to Haryana and Punjab to avail of the minimum support prices offered there.

An earlier NDA government, in its great wisdom, did away with the agriculture produce marketing boards (APMC) in 2005 and left farmers to deal with the open market. This failed to work. Farmers are thus forced to sell their produce at throwaway prices to the middlemen still, making agriculture an unremunerative occupation.

Migration from the state is endemic.

Those who were taken as slaves to Mauritius, the Netherlands and the Caribbean Islands turned out to be the luckier of the unfortunates — at least their progeny prospered in the years subsequent to decolonisation.

Back home, there is little authentic data to substantiate claims that 20 per cent of the state’s population continues to migrate every year to other states for employment. However, the overcrowded trains bound to Bihar before festivals, especially the Chhath Puja, seem to vindicate such claims.

Ironically, the state appears to have received a far better deal from the UPA government under Dr Manmohan Singh in the past.

Projects such as the NTPC plant in Barh, a rail project in Harnaut, doubling and gauge conversion of various rail routes, the Koderma–Hazaribagh connection as well as rail bridges over the Ganga on the Patna–Sonepur and Munger–Khagaria stretches were all launched with central assistance during the UPA years.

As railway minister, Lalu Prasad Yadav brought the Rail Wheel Plant to Saran and the electric locomotive factory to Madhepura.

The union rural development minister at the time, the late Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, was equally generous in granting funds for rural roads in Bihar.

The state also benefitted hugely from the employment guarantee scheme under the MGNREGA.

The UPA years also saw the central university of South Bihar come up in Gaya and a central university of North Bihar in Motihari, besides the off-campus branch of Aligarh Muslim University in Kishanganj.

The project to revive Nalanda University as an international university also began during the UPA years, but was derailed quickly by the NDA government after 2014. Today Nalanda University functions more as a training centre and retreat for the MEA, which funds it; it is not as well-regarded as an academic institution.

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The sops offered for Bihar in the Union Budget do not seem to have gone down well with people living outside Bihar.

Several of them felt that at a time when people in the state are struggling because of a shortage of decent employment opportunities and inflation, the offer of setting up a makhana board sounds like a joke. It is well known that makhana grown in Bihar is transported to industrial centres in Maharashtra for processing and that the packaged — air-fried, salted, flavoured — fox nuts have been sold in malls for years, they point out.

The state needs industry, better facilities for education and hospitals and a major push for the small and marginal farmers in the state. What has been offered in the Union Budget, they say, is just lip service before the election.

Pointing out that the bullet train project between Ahmedabad and Mumbai, despite hundreds of existing trains and dozens of flights connecting the two cities, is going to cost the country over Rs 1 lakh crore, they wonder why Bihar does not deserve more and faster trains.

“Every year, the media show pictures of overcrowded trains to and from Bihar; but we are being asked to be content with a makhana board and a food technology institute,” certain anonymous observers fumed. The government’s focus is more on developing Gujarat and Odisha, they complained.

So, why doesn’t the union government invest enough in Bihar, which returns as many as 40 MPs to the Lok Sabha? One of my interlocutors offered an explanation.

The NDA government under Modi and Shah is unlikely to allow investment in Bihar until they install a fully BJP government in the state.

Bihar is a state where they have never formed a government on their own, never had a BJP chief minister. So, Biharis may continue demanding parity with Gujarat, but that is unlikely to happen under this dispensation at least.