What drives progress and development in a region? Does it stem from the equal rights granted by the state to citizens, ensuring dignity? Does it arise from equal opportunities fostering economic growth? Is it rooted in ownership and a sense of security within the region? Or is it an amalgamation of all these — social justice, ownership, equality, opportunities, and infrastructure — that leads to progress? Can true development materialise when symbolic changes occur without the backing of material changes?

These are some of the critical questions examined by Sandipan Baksi and Mrityunjay Pandey in their article “Limitations of the Politics of Social Justice in Transforming Rural Bihar”. Their analysis of Bihar reveals a stark contradiction. While the State is well known for its progressive political stance that covers social justice, dignity, and equality; in terms of socio-economic indicators, it remains ranked the lowest in the country. Bihar’s per capita income at current prices for 2024–25 was around ₹70,000, while for India it was approximately ₹2.05 lakh. In terms of the Human Development Index (HDI) as well, Bihar ranked the lowest, at 0.650 compared to India’s 0.685 (2023).

Such a paradox requires an in-depth study to understand whether symbolic gains in dignity suffice in the absence of material redistribution.

Drawing on quantitative data from a village survey conducted in 2012 and a resurvey in 2018 across two villages in Bihar — Katkuian in West Champaran district and Nayanagar in Samastipur district — the authors of the paper attempt to demonstrate how limited the politics of social justice remains without effective implementation.

The paper underscores that in a country like India, as long as social justice movements and their leadership remain linked to the asset-owning elite and upper classes and castes who seek to preserve the agrarian class-caste status quo, socio-economic changes that help improve the lives of the people in the region are not possible.

Socio-economic conditions

Bihar remains mostly rural, with the bulk of the population in rural regions. Agriculture engages the majority of the rural workforce and directly shapes lives, livelihoods, and social status. The lives of the majority are characterised by extreme poverty, lack of employment, meagre agricultural wages, and absent healthcare facilities. The situation is worse for women and backward castes, Scheduled Castes, and Scheduled Tribes.

A striking feature of Bihar’s economy is extreme inequality in land ownership, a primary means of production, with many households lacking even house-site ownership, leading to insecurity. Two-thirds of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe households remain landless. Despite all this, Bihar is known for a strong sense of political awareness rooted in identity politics, the leaders demanding representation, often fueling vibrant electoral participation in the State.

The political evolution

Bihar’s political evolution centred on the slogan “roti aur izzat” (bread and dignity), driven by pre-independence movements that blended peasant struggles through the Bihar Pradesh Kisan Sabha, socialist reforms for land redistribution and caste equality, and backwards-caste assertions by Yadavs, Kurmis, and Koeris against upper-caste dominance. The abolition of Zamindari tenures post-independence empowered these groups, resulting in the Backward Classes Federation’s push for reservations.

With this, leaders such as Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan started focusing on ensuring that backward castes and classes were represented in the political sphere. Through a persistent fight for reservation and inclusion, a strong political identity emerged among these communities. From the 1970s through the 1990s, under the leadership of figures like Lalu Prasad Yadav, a “silent revolution” took place that broke upper-caste dominance in politics, effectively paving the way for backward communities to secure their place through the implementation of reservations.

The dichotomy

While this evolution delivered political representation for backward castes, it left underlying agrarian structures intact, perpetuating inequality from unequal land distribution. Zamindari abolition helped middle peasantry like Yadavs, Kurmis, and Koeris gain some land, but the Backward Classes Federation prioritised reservations over deeper reforms, ignoring persistent rural land disparities.

Even in power, wealthy landowning backward caste elites dominated parties, maintaining economic hierarchies. By 2020, candidates’ average assets topped ₹4-6 crore__,__ far exceeding the rural household average.

These shortcomings explain why Bihar ranks lowest across development indices, enduring deplorable health, education, poverty, and unemployment.

According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2023-24 data, the national literacy rate was 80.9%, while Bihar trailed at 74.3% with a significant gender gap. The situation in Katkuian and Nayanagar illustrates how this lag persists across Rural Bihar. In Katkuian, while literacy for those aged seven and above rose from 60% in 2012 to 79% in 2018, and female literacy for the same age group improved from 46.7% to 67%, it remained lower than the country’s average. In Nayanagar, despite higher overall literacy than in Katkuian, deep inequalities still persist. For instance, the 2012 survey found that among Dalit households, who made up 34% of the village population, only two individuals had graduate degrees. On the other hand, over 30% of males from “Others” caste categories were graduates.

Asset ownership data further highlights these inequalities. In Katkuian, 50% of households were landless in 2012, of which 14% were Yadavs, and the share of asset ownership only worsened by 2018. Similarly, Nayanagar exhibited sharp resource disparities, with Bhumihar households, who made up only 22% of the village population, owning over 95% of the agricultural land.

Housing conditions, including access to electricity, latrines, and LPG, also remained poor across both villages, even though they showed some improvement compared to 2012. This reveals a stark dichotomy; progressive political ideologies expanded representation, but yielded no meaningful social or economic development, as struggles for land redistribution and labour rights stayed marginalised from mainstream politics.

Conclusion

Such persistent gaps between political empowerment and ground-level stagnation demand a re-evaluation of the scope of social justice.

The State of Kerala, for instance, is an example of the need to bring structural changes, alongside progressive ideologies. The implementation of land policies through equitable distribution in the State has led to greater ownership and a stronger sense of security among the population. This has had a significant impact in promoting better education systems and literacy, improving infrastructure, and enhancing living standards. This contrast highlights the limits of relying solely on symbolic or policy-driven measures of inclusion. Reservation alone, therefore, achieves little in the absence of material transformation.

In agrarian Bihar, where land and assets dominate, reservations achieve little on their own. Thus, this paper becomes highly relevant in underscoring the need to dismantle persisting agrarian structures that maintain inequality, in order to bring about overall development in the region, lest social justice remain merely aspirational.

(Rebecca Rose Varghese is a freelance journalist.)

Published - April 28, 2026 08:30 am IST