Bihar is one of the the big states in India. Bihar is third populated state in India.

More than
85% of population stays in rural area and the Bihar is the least urbanized state of the country.
The state is basically a rural economy and 3/4 th of main workers depend on agriculture for
their livelihoods which contributes 24% of total GDP. Despite of huge portion of population
engaged in agriculture, productivity wise it is almost half of that of country average and one
fifth that of Punjab. The state has high rate of migration and 30.64 per cent of the rural
households reporting migration were at 44.1 per cent of the total households are in debt.
Almost 43% of the total households are landless and another 39 % has less than 2.5 acre of
land. Land distribution is highly skewed with almost 66 per cent of house hold owning only
20% of the total cultivable land. Bihar land distribution show very high degree of disparity
compared to other part of country. According to the data released by Ministry of Agriculture
in 2003-04, in Bihar 80.14% of land holders are having less than 2.5 acre of land which is far
higher than the national figure which is 61.5 percent and which is not enough to generate
livelihoods for the majority of the land holders.
In the back drop of such a socio-economic scenario it is tough to implement MNREGA in the
state and scheme is performing miserably.
Let us have a look at following data which shows how Bihar is lagging behind our
performance as a nation in implementing this scheme.

Chart Title

6627353
6186588
5617753

3806996
3538166

115916 110535 76672 103627 108970

2014-15 2015-16 2016-17 2017-18 2018-19

BIHAR INDIA

Other than above mentioned factors and socio-economic web described above there are certain
other factors which leads to miserable performance of Bihar in implementing this scheme.

 Huge gap in Job card holders and the ratio of their participation in the program
 Non labour friendly payment norms in the scheme
 Interference of the government officials in the program
 Politics in the selection of the schemes
 Elite capture in the scheme