Aurangabad

Aurangabad in Bihar carries the name of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, but the city's story begins much earlier—at the intersection of the Ganges plain's agricultural wealth and ancient trade routes linking northern India's interior. Unlike its more famous namesake in Maharashtra, this Aurangabad sits in one of India's poorest states, where fertile soil never translated into industrial development because colonial and post-colonial investment consistently flowed elsewhere.

Bihar's economic history is one of extraction without reinvestment. The British Raj drew agricultural surplus from the Gangetic plain while building railways and factories in Calcutta and Bombay. After independence, Bihar was further diminished when the mineral-rich Chota Nagpur plateau was carved off to create Jharkhand in 2000, stripping away the state's industrial base. Aurangabad, like most Bihar cities, was left with agriculture, government employment, and the remittances of workers who migrated to Delhi, Mumbai, and the Gulf states. This source-sink pattern—talent and capital flowing out, remittances flowing back—defines the city's metabolism.

The city's population exceeds a million, but its economic footprint remains modest compared to Indian cities of similar size. Small-scale manufacturing, food processing, and educational institutions anchor the local economy. Nalanda University, the ancient center of Buddhist learning, lies nearby—a reminder that this region was once a global intellectual hub that attracted scholars from across Asia. Bihar's modern push to revive Nalanda as an international university represents an attempt to recapture that historical role.

Aurangabad exemplifies the challenge facing hundreds of Indian cities: abundant human capital, deep historical roots, but insufficient infrastructure and investment to retain the talent it produces. Whether Bihar's recent infrastructure spending and educational investments can reverse the source-sink dynamic remains the city's central evolutionary question.