Bihar CM hails industries dept action plan to catapult Bihar among top five states

Bihar aims to attract ₹50 lakh crore in investments to become a top five investment-friendly state, with major industrial reforms and developments planned.

Chief minister Nitish Kumar on Saturday said the industries department would organise investors’ meets in all major commercial centres across India and abroad to attract the largest possible industries, with the clear goal of placing Bihar among the country’s top five investment-friendly states in the coming years.

Bihar CM Nitish Kumar with Dy CM Samrat Choudhary holds meeting of industries department in Patna, Saturday (SANTOSH KUMAR/HT)

The CM stated this in a post on social media platform X, after reviewing the roadmap of the industries department at a meeting at his residential office here on Saturday. Chief secretary Pratyay Amrit presented the five-year roadmap to catapult Bihar among the top-ranking states.

This also aligned with the announcements made by NDA leaders, including PM Narendra Modi, during the campaign for the recently concluded Bihar assembly elections, said a senior officer of the department, adding that work had already begun on a detailed action plan to bring ₹50 lakh crore worth of investments in the state over next five years.

The roadmap, the CM said, included aggressive ease of doing business reforms, establishment of five new mega food parks with state-of-the-art processing and logistics facilities, development of ten large industrial parks and 100 MSME parks, skill training to seven lakh youth in industry-relevant trades, and the creation of a full-fledged MSME directorate along with dedicated MSME facilitation centres in all districts.

From just 46 notified industrial areas in 2005, the number has more than doubled to 94 by 2025. The count of functional industrial units has jumped from 1,674 to around 3,500 in the same period. Perhaps the sharpest indicator of the shift is in exports: industrial goods worth a mere ₹25 crore left Bihar in 2005; this year the figure has crossed ₹17,000 crore.

The real explosion has come in the MSME space. Registered micro, small and medium enterprises have shot up from roughly 72,000 in 2005 to 3.5 million today. Industry’s share in Bihar’s GSDP, which languished at 5.4 per cent twenty years ago, now stands above 21 per cent – a four-fold jump that few states have managed in such a short span.

Sources in the industries department say the state is no longer content resting on these laurels. A high-level plan has already been rolled out to attract ₹50 lakh crore in fresh investment over the next five years and push Bihar into the country’s top five investment-friendly states.

On the ground, the CM’s Udyami Yojana has already disbursed seed money to 44,073 young entrepreneurs, many of whom have set up units that are now employing others in their villages and blocks.

The roadmap proposes to position Bihar as eastern India’s new technology hub. Separate apex committees have been formed to drive a defence corridor, a semiconductor manufacturing park, global capability centres, a mega tech city and a fintech city. Another panel is working to turn the state into a global back-end and remote-work hub, while a third is focused on scaling up the start-up ecosystem.

“Infrastructure projects are moving fast. The 1,700-acre integrated manufacturing cluster at Dobhi near Gaya is in the final stages and will be inaugurated soon. On the same lines, 31 new state-of-the-art industrial townships – including ten sector-specific parks for textiles, pharmaceuticals and other high-value industries – will come up on 14,036 acres across 29 districts. The state has earmarked ₹26,000 crore just for these industrial nodes,” said a government press communique issued after the review meeting..

Officials point out that the basic enablers are already in place: good road and rail connectivity, new airports and air cargo facilities, round-the-clock power supply, and a visible improvement in law and order. The political message is blunt – “We want Bihar’s youth to find jobs at home, not be forced to migrate.”

“Twenty years ago few investors would have taken a Bihar pitch seriously. Today, the state government says the numbers speak for themselves – and the next five years will decide whether India’s most talked-about turnaround story finally becomes its most admired growth engine,” stated the CM’s post.