How to Win over the Biggest Votebank

On June 2, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar announced 33 per cent reservations for women in the state’s medical and engineering colleges, marking another watershed in his determined push to empower women in a state where patriarchal mores have held sway. Women already account for a third of these seats, and with these reservations will most likely outnumber the men in Bihar’s technical campuses.

This will be quite a feat for a state where female literacy is just 60.5 per cent (against the national average of 70.3 per cent), according to a 2018 ministry of statistics and programme implementation survey, and where over a thousand cases of dowry deaths are reported every