Bihar

Bihar occupies the Gangetic plains where iron ore, fertile alluvium, and river transport once converged to birth empires. The counterintuition: the soil that enabled India's first great civilization now produces more emigrant laborers than industrial output, exporting human capital the way it once exported statecraft.

The Magadha kingdom rose here around 600 BCE because geography concentrated advantages. Five hills shielded Rajgir from invasion. The Ganges connected traders to Bengal's ports. Iron deposits in the southern highlands armed superior armies. The Son and Gandak rivers delivered nutrient-rich silt that fed growing populations. Pataliputra, at the confluence of major waterways, became a command center for communication in all directions. From this base, Chandragupta Maurya unified most of the subcontinent. When Siddhartha Gautama achieved enlightenment at Bodh Gaya around 528 BCE, he walked Bihar's roads teaching the dharma. Three centuries later, Nalanda University emerged as the world's first residential institution of higher learning, housing 10,000 students and 2,000 teachers from across Asia.

The medieval period brought disruption and reinvention. Around 1193, Nalanda was destroyed, its library burning for months. Yet Bihar adapted. Sher Shah Suri, ruling from his base in Sasaram, rebuilt Patna from Pataliputra's ruins and constructed the Grand Trunk Road, linking Bengal to Kabul. Mughal rule made Patna a commercial node in imperial trade networks. British colonization absorbed Bihar into Bengal Presidency, where the Permanent Settlement of 1793 locked land patterns that concentrated wealth among zamindars while peasants bore fixed revenue demands regardless of harvest. Modern Bihar's defining amputation came in November 2000 when Jharkhand separated, taking 40 percent of India's mineral wealth, three-quarters of industrial units, and 60 percent of the revenue base.

Today Bihar holds 130 million inhabitants with per-capita income one-third the national average. The state exports labor at scale unmatched elsewhere in India: roughly half of Gulf-bound migrants now originate from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, with districts like Siwan and Gopalganj deriving 80 percent of local economic activity from remittances. Programs like Super 30 channel ambition into competitive examination success. Bihar's 40 Lok Sabha seats make it a coalition kingmaker. In June 2024, the new Nalanda University campus opened near the ancient ruins.

By 2026, Bihar's remittance economy increasingly resembles Kerala's earlier pattern, with human mobility substituting for industrial development.