Patna: By definition, Musallahpur Hat should brim with optimism and hope.If there was a heatmap measuring Bihar’s ambition, Musallahpur Hat should have stood out as the brightest, throbbing red hot spot of ambition.That’s because Musallahpur Hat is to Bihar what Kota is to India – it is where students from across the state make their way in droves, seeking teaching and training that helps them ace competitive government recruitment exams. The neighbourhood is a complete ecosystem: this is where aspirants live, this is where they study. Every coaching institute has a branch here; every shop here is attuned to student interest, selling everything from recycled books to filtered water. Even the names of the shops here peddle dreams: from Happy Life Academy to Job Junction, from Oxford Library to Super Coaching.Which is why, hubs like Musallahpur Hat are centres for hope.And yet, Musallahpur Hat is where it is starkly clear: the story of Bihari youth’s hopes and aspirations starts in these lanes and also ends here. Most aspirants who come here end up without naukri, jobs, and realise that it has also left them bereft of ijjat, honour.Like it was with 29-year-old Prakash Kumar. Hailing from East Champaran, he spent five years in these lanes, hopping from class to class, trying to land a government job. Any government job, he clarifies. What job was he passionate about? What did he really want to be? Prakash laughs out loud at the questions.“Yeh Mumbai nahi hai, sir,” Prakash, cheekily replies. “Humare yahaan, Bihar mein, yeh nahin bataya jaata ki aap passion ko follow karo,” he says. “Yahaan bachpan se yahi bataya jaata hai ki aap sarkari naukri mein jao, chahe aap chaprasi bano ya daroga.” This isn’t Mumbai, this is Bihar. Here we are not told to follow our passion. Instead, it is drilled into our heads that we must get a government job – doesn’t matter if it is a police officer or a peon.So, Prakash followed the instructions. He tried at his hand at everything – from applying for a stint at the National Defence Academy, to clerical roles in banks as well government jobs in Bihar. For five years, he applied repeatedly, but to no success.Then, he landed a job at a Patna non-profit. He was ecstatic. It was when he went back to his village that he realised he shouldn’t be. The villagers mocked him as a failure for not bagging a government job, his job was the butt of jokes. “It didn’t matter to them that I was earning well, that I had a job. What mattered was, I couldn’t land a government job,” Prakash says. “Private job ko ijjat nahi hai. Sirf sarkari naukri se ijjat milta hai (There is no honour in private jobs. Only government jobs are respected).”Also read: In Seemanchal, BJP’s ‘Infiltrators’ Narrative is Drowned Out by PovertyIn this poll season, both the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Mahagathbandhan (MGB), as well as the newcomer Jan Suraaj Party, are trying to woo Bihar’s youth with one-up promises on jobs. While the NDA has promised to create one crore jobs, the MGB has committed to creating one government job per family in Bihar. Jan Suraaj founder Prashant Kishore has said his party would ensure Bihari youth get jobs in the state and don’t have to migrate for their livelihoods. All this should have resonated with the state’s youth. After all, Bihar is India’s poorest state, with 35% of its population falling under poverty according to the World Bank. The state’s unemployment rate for the year 2023-24 (the last year for which data was available) was 10% for the age group between 15-29, rising to 34% among graduates and post-graduates.But for those like Prakash and the many others in the teeming lanes of Musallahpur Hat, the 2025 Bihar elections are not just about naukri. In India’s youngest state, the battle for a government job isn’t just about finding a livelihood. It is about finding something even more illusive: ijjat. And paradoxically, it is in finding a naukri that many end up losing their honour, their ijjat.The long waitVibha Kumari, 26, is testament to this.If you were to be living in her Darbhanga village during her early years, you would have known she was meant to succeed. When other girls her age were being married off, Vibha insisted she wanted to be an engineer, eliciting a collective gasp from scandalised villagers. The gasp grew longer and louder when, in 2015, she heard that a 22-year-old girl like her named Tina Dhabi had topped the UPSC exams at her first attempt. Vibha packed her bags and headed to Patna to follow her footsteps, taunting villagers of no consequence to her.But when she got to Patna, she saw the gulf between her aspiration and reality. “I didn’t know anything about these exams or what it took. It was only after I got to Patna that I realised the effort the preparation was going to entail,” she recounts.Slowly, she realised that her single-minded focus on the UPSC might not be sustainable – she would have to prepare for other government jobs so as to justify the money it was costing her family to keep her in Patna.So Vibha succumbed to the rigmarole and started applying to any job that came up: from government teachers, to child development project officer roles, to clerical and administrative posts in the Bihar administration. None worked out. She made multiple UPSC attempts, with little luck.Vibha Kumari. Photo: Kunal Purohit“I must have appeared for 7-8 different exams,” Vibha laughs. The effort came at a cost. From battling anxiety and mental health issues that come with living alone in Patna, to persisting in the face of failures, Vibha has had to navigate the rocky path mostly by herself.But each time she goes back home, she realises that her efforts mean little for society. “The truth is: if you can’t crack it, you end up being a zero. Your effort means nothing,” she says, recounting instances of friends and family taunting her, mocking her repeated failures, advising her parents to get her married instead.Prakash, from the Patna non-profit, says students like Vibha find themselves stuck. “We are all stuck in a never-ending cycle of wait and greed. Society highlights the two students who land government jobs but conveniently hides the 100 others who failed,” he says.His own mama, his mother’s brother, senior to him by over a decade, tried cracking government jobs for 13 years. “At one point, we were both competing for the same jobs,” he says, only half-amused.Which is why, he had set a five-year deadline for himself. If he didn’t get a government job within that timeline, he would move on. “But even those years of preparing were full of anxiety,” Prakash recounts. “People back in the village keep talking about your failures, they keep asking you why you haven’t got a job. That’s why, many of us refuse to give up and try till they are exhausted,” he adds. When COVID-19 struck, Biharis who had migrated to different parts of India came back home, but many aspirants in Patna did not go back to their village, “because they knew they would be mocked”, says Prakash.This is something that Ramanshu Mishra sees all the time.Mishra runs the popular ‘Ramanshu GS classes’, which offers coaching for everything from police recruitment to court jobs to peon roles across Bihar and Jharkhand. Mishra’s GS classes have anywhere between 5,000 and 7,000 students enrolled at any time, he says.Ramanshu Mishra. Photo: Kunal PurohitBut there’s one pattern that repeats itself constantly. “When children come here, they realise that their school and college level education has been so poor that they don’t know the basics of anything at all,” Mishra says. “So, they need to take coaching for even fundamental concepts and by the time they get a grip, their parents have run out of money. That’s when children get so desperate they can do anything – even kill someone – just to be able to stay here.”Data backs this. A 2023 study by Patna University professor Debjani Sarkar Ghose found that 55% of families who send their children to Patna’s coaching centres earn less than Rs 50,000 a month. Yet, coaching centres charge anywhere from Rs 15,000 to 1,50,000 a year from students.Often, this means that students are forced to live in squalor, just so that they can continue to stay in Patna. A walk through Musallahpur Hat bares these realities: haphazardly constructed, unfinished, unplastered structures have dozens of matchbox-size rooms with common toilets, drains often overflowing. A black, viscous nullah flows through the neighbourhood, with mosquitoes swarming over it at any point in the day.Students joke that ill health is a part of the Musallahpur Hat experience.“Here, we say that even before you can finish reading your first chapter after coming here, you will be diagnosed with malaria or dengue,” says Pratham Kumar, 20, who came from Jehanabad district to get a government job. “Yeh narak hai,” he says, plainly. This is hell.For many students, the fight for a job erodes not just their health but also their sense of self.Mishra, from GS classes, witnesses this each year. “When children first come to Patna, they are brimming with hope, they have a lustre on their face,” he says. A few years in Patna, the aspirants look like pale shadows of their former selves.“They become thin, their eyes sink in, their faces lose the shine. They cannot afford vegetables or fruits, so they are often under-nourished,” he says.Also read: Debt, Deficit and Dependence: What Bihar’s Balance Sheet Says About Its EconomyYet students hang on to the hope of being able to make it. For this, Mishra, despite owning a popular coaching centre himself, blames the state’s Bihar’s coaching industry.“Coaching institutes are the biggest peddlers of dreams in India,” he says, candidly. “They sell dreams and sell it to the highest and the lowest buyer – if you can afford Rs 30,000, they will sell you a course worth that. But if you can only afford Rs 2,000, they will sell you the same in that price,” he says.Vibha, who has been in Patna for nine years, is proof of this.Her father’s job as a court clerk didn’t allow for much luxury. But in Patna, she didn’t have a choice – she had to enroll into coaching centres at regular intervals to train for various exams. Each class cost anywhere from Rs 15,000 to Rs 40,000. She has enrolled herself multiple times already, and might need to continue doing so.She doesn’t know whether it will yield anything at all, by the end of it. But she can’t step away. “I have given so much to the studies that I don’t want to back out now,” she says.The rage withinIt’s such struggles that often push students into rage and frustration, manifested in frequent student protests here in Patna.Between 2018 and 2022, Bihar saw at least 400 student protests, second only to Kerala which saw 510 such protests led by students, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau. Many of them are often met with violent responses by the state administration, thereby only deepening the anger among students.In September this year, large numbers of students gathered to protest the delay in the recruitment of constables in the Bihar police were lathi-charged by police officials in Patna. In August, job aspirants clashed with the police after they protested delays in holding the State Teacher Eligibility Test (STET), meant for teaching positions in the state. Despite regulations around holding the test twice a year, it had not been held even once in 2025, forcing protesters to hit the streets.In July, hundreds of students held protests and were beaten up by police forces, after they demanded a domicile policy that would ensure that government jobs in the state would be reserved for Biharis. Last year, in December, tens of thousands of students, including coaching centre owner Mishra, occupied Patna’s Gandhi Maidan over irregularities in the 70th Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC) examinations conducted on December 13. The protests continued for over three months, and wound up only after the Supreme Court rejected petitions filed by protesting students for a re-examinations.Hoardings featuring Nitish Kumar and Tejashwi Yadav in Patna. Photo: Kunal PurohitEach time the students protested, they were met with a police response that included lathis or even being pulled and beaten up with bare hands. Mishra from GS classes became the face of these andolans and was even arrested for his involvement.For many students, watching from the sidelines, this was yet another reminder: the struggle for a job was linked with the struggle for dignity and respect.Which is why, many in Bihar will be voting not just for those who offer them jobs, but also offering dignity.Eighteen-year-old Patna university student Arnab Kumar, hailing from Muzaffarpur, had participated in some of these protests, even though he wasn’t eligible for any government jobs yet.He said he would always appreciate the work that chief minister Nitish Kumar had put in to transform Bihar. Yet, he has witnessed gaping holes in Bihar’s education system that make him angry. His school in Muzaffarpur had only three teachers to teach classes 1 to 8, and they would barely able to teach. “Our generation has lost out on so much because of such poor education,” he says.When he came to Patna and heard students protesting for better education and more jobs, it struck a chord within him and he decided to watch the protests from the sidelines. What he saw disheartened him: protesters were assaulted by the police, dragged by their collars. In his mind, chief minister Nitish was to be blamed.The police action made him realise that a similar fate might await him if he had to ever partake in an agitation for a job. That’s when he decided: he was going to vote against the NDA.“Agar kisi neta ko bahut samay tak rehne do, toh woh taanashah ban jaata hai (If you allow any leader to hold on to power for a very long time, they become a dictator),” Arnab explained.Nitish had brought major improvements in Bihar, the NDA’s job pitch was appealing. He did want a bright future for himself, but he also wanted it with his respect intact.Ijjat, Arnab said, mattered as much as a job.