Compelling empirical evidence from developing countries that achieved high human development and economic indicators (South Korea, Malaysia and Taiwan in Asia; Costa Rica in Latin America) shows how certain threshold levels of public employment, especially in sectors like education, healthcare and police, not only develop needed human capital for economic growth but is good for human well being.Therefore, in a state like Bihar, which has the lowest human development index (HDI) among Indian states, the case for massively enhancing public employment in these essential areas becomes even more pertinent. There are huge vacancies in these three sectors in the state. If they are not filled, there is little possibility that the quality of health services or education can improve. In their absence, Bihar cannot have more employment at home, and will remain a state whose economy survives upon subsistence agriculture, growing services, or migrant remittances. Similarly, there is little prospect of investment in Bihar picking up despite the Investment Summit organised by the Bihar government on December 11-13, 2023 if the quality of local governance does not improve. Some studies suggest that operations of organised crime, often local, are a reason for the deindustrialisation that Bihar has suffered in the past two decades. Hence, it is critical that there are, at the very least, sufficient policemen to address the problem (though their political capture needs to be precluded). Owing to the lack of publicly available official data on total state government employment in Bihar, our analysis is based on employment data in sector-specific Union and state government reports but also investigative news media reports over the past decade.As of 2022, Bihar’s total state government employment, including permanent and contractual employees, stood at close to 4.5 lakh. Almost 85% of this was formed by the three sectors of education (including school and higher education), health and police. Hence, it is critical to scrutinise these three segments. Bihar’s schoolsBihar’s government schools are the state’s biggest employer, like other Indian states. As per the Ministry of Education’s Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+), till FY’22, Bihar’s government schools had 4 lakh teachers – out of which close to 3.5 lakh were on contract. This gave a Pupil Teacher Ratio (PTR) of 55.28, much higher than states like Uttar Pradesh (33), Maharashtra (30.40), West Bengal (34.88), Karnataka (28.69) and Tamil Nadu (24.52). To meet the PTR benchmark of 30 as stipulated by India’s National Education Policy (NEP), Bihar needed a staggering 3.38 lakh more government school teachers in FY22.In fact, the state had 2.2 lakh government teacher vacancies based on the government’s own sanctioned posts till FY22. The situation came to a head because successive governments failed to conduct any permanent recruitment while insufficient contractual hiring remained mired in court cases and public protests. It is only in 2023 that some strong green shoots appeared with the hiring of 1.2 lakh permanent teachers in one go, a record of sorts. However, there is no data available on how many of those recruited were already working as contractual teachers or how many are from other states. If people from these two categories were in high numbers, the sector’s problems will not subside anytime soon. In higher education, the number of sanctioned vacancies was close to 22,000 (over 13,500 teaching and over 8,000 non-teaching positions) as of early 2022. These numbers grew rapidly in recent years owing to newer universities and colleges opening without commensurate hiring. So sanctioned vacancies are 50-80%. Bihar’s higher education PTR is 60, while the pan-India figure was 24 (All India Survey on Higher Education 2020-21). Unlike school education, employment in the Bihar government’s higher educational institutions has not been revived. Appointment letter recipients in Patna. Photo: Special arrangement.HealthLike most parts of the country, Bihar’s public healthcare system was laid bare during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even the few, better-known city government hospitals have corridors to courtyards filled with suffering patients and unattended corpses. WHO prescribes there should be 1 doctor per 1,000 persons in any country or administrative unit; the Bihar assembly was told that the state had 1 government doctor per 22,000. In a poor country, especially Bihar whose per capita income is one-third of India’s average, the majority of people entirely depend on public healthcare.At the same time, the numbers for sanctioned vacancies or shortfall (the latter based on national or international benchmarks) vary with every source. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s 2021-22 Rural Health Statistics report put sanctioned vacancies in Bihar at over 58,400 and the total shortfall based on Indian Public Health Standards benchmarks at over 64,300. On the other hand, a 2021-22 report by Bihar Health Society put sanctioned vacancies at close to 38,000. PoliceThe third major recruiter in the Bihar government is the police. UN prescribes at least 222 police personnel per lakh population. Indian home ministry’s Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPRD) stated that until January 1, 2022, to meet the UN benchmark, the Bihar police needed an additional 1.82 lakh employees. That figure is 39,000 more than the total employed strength of Bihar Police of 1.43 lakh. As of mid-2023, 75,000 sanctioned vacancies existed. The consequence of this gross neglect over decades has been that Bihar had India’s highest number of land and property-related crimes and ranked second in murders and murder attempts, rapes and crimes against Dalits (National Crime Records Bureau, 2021). However, the state’s policing has seen some silver lining with nearly 10,500 personnel hired in one go in late 2022 and the recruitment of another 22,650 already underway.Still, the total workforce shortage in Bihar in the above three sectors – based on national and international benchmarks – stood at almost 6 lakh as of 2022, while sanctioned vacancies were over 3.75 lakh. This has kept the quality of public service delivery in Bihar at rock bottom for decades. The state’s financial situation owing to a lack of productive investments has seen Bihar endure declining tax revenues as a percentage of GSDP while being unable to utilise Union government funds worth tens of thousands of crores. This is where public sector hiring in human well-being areas like education, healthcare and law and order will unlock doors to higher investment rates and result in far higher tax revenues. Further, expanded hiring in high labour-intensive sectors like education and health (which employ a relatively higher proportion of women) will not only reduce gender disparities but also create higher disposable incomes for numerous lower to middle-income households, thereby pushing the economic cycle. A hub and spoke model for education with each district or municipality having a school acting as a hub and other schools as spokes could provide autonomy in resource sharing and decentralised decision-making. In healthcare, the state must aim for a public investment amounting to 2% of GSDP by 2025 and 2.5% by 2027 as envisaged in the National Health Policy of 2017. Similarly, meeting shortcomings in police in existing and emerging economic hubs on a war footing will bring in rapid investments which can then fund meeting the needs of backward areas within a few years. Hence, hiring more teachers, health staff and policemen is a must for Bihar to realise its true potential and a first step to emerge from its cycle of poverty and backwardness once and for all. Santosh Mehrotra is a Professorial Fellow (Economics), Prime Minister’s Museum & Library, New Delhi, and the lead author of a new report on creating employment with growth in Bihar. Anchal Gupta is a graduate student at the University of Ottawa, Canada, in aeronautical engineering, and a member of the Bihar report team
