Migration: why Bihar's biggest export is its young people

The calculation every family makes

The gap between an unskilled daily wage in a Bihar village and the same work in Ludhiana, Surat or Delhi is often more than double — and there the work lasts twelve months, while here the months after the harvest are empty. No family can ignore that gap. Moral lectures about migration are therefore useless; what has to change is the number the family is deciding on.

What comes back, and what never does

Money sent home by migrant workers is a genuine economic spine for rural Bihar — it builds roofs, pays school fees and covers emergency treatment. What does not come back is time: the working life between twenty and forty is added to another state's output, and so are the skills, the taxes and the small businesses that would have grown from them.

There is a hidden cost too: interrupted schooling for children, elder care falling entirely on women, and no preparedness for the lakhs who return suddenly during an epidemic or a downturn.

What could actually generate work in Bihar

Bihar already has what no other state can copy: fertile land, water and a dense labour force. The shortfall is not in production but in processing and market access. Makhana, maize, litchi, banana, vegetables and milk largely leave the state raw, and the value is added somewhere else.

• Block-level cold chains and small processing units owned by farmer groups rather than distant contractors.
• Working-capital credit for micro-enterprises, with single-window clearance inside 30 days.
• Local-first public procurement, starting with school meals, hospital supplies and construction material.
• Registration, accident insurance and skill recognition for migrant workers when they return.

Making migration a choice, not a compulsion

Our aim is not that nobody leaves Bihar. It is that leaving becomes a choice rather than a compulsion, and that returning is possible. Towards that we are starting to count, district by district, how many durable jobs a scheme actually created — not how many inaugurations it held.