Nitish Kumar brings back domicile policy for teachers’ recruitment in Bihar

This will be implemented from the TRE-4, which will be conducted this year, while TRE-5 will be held in 2026, the chief minister said.

PATNA: Ahead of the state elections later this year, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar on Monday said the state would soon give preference to candidates domiciled in Bihar in the recruitment of government teachers.

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar at the Disaster Management Centre in Sardar Patel Bhawan in Patna, Bihar (HT Photo/Santosh Kumar)

“I have given instructions to the education department for necessary amendments in the rules to give preference to residents of Bihar (domicile). This will be implemented from the Teachers’ Recruitment Exam (TRE) - 4,” he said in a post in Hindi on X.

This will be implemented from the TRE-4, which will be conducted this year, while TRE-5 will be held in 2026, the chief minister said.

The chief minister didn’t indicate what percentage of the teacher recruitments would be reserved for candidates who are domiciled in the state.

The state government is likely to issue a notification for TRE-4, covering nearly 100,000 vacancies, within a week or so.

The Bihar School Examination Board has conducted the teacher recruitment examination in 2011, 2019-2020 and 2023. The government announced in 2024 that the recruitment examination would be held twice every year but the board was not able to deliver on this announcement.

Monday’s announcement comes amid a growing demand for reservations for Bihar’s youth in state government jobs, and is seen as an effort to neutralise a campaign by the opposition parties to seek implementation of a domicile policy.

To be sure, the Nitish Kumar government had scrapped the domicile policy in the recruitment of government teachers in June 2023, which led to violent protests by job aspirants in the state. At the time, the state government stood its ground, arguing that the domicile clause was removed because it was not “legally tenable”.

However, last month, the Nitish Kumar-led cabinet also decided that only women who are permanent residents of the state would be eligible to apply for state government jobs under the 35% quota introduced in 2016.

Last week, Kumar also announced a doubling of honorarium to cooks preparing mid-day meal schemes for students in the government schools, night guards working in the secondary and higher secondary schools, and physical education and health instructors.

In TRE-1 & 2, the government recruited 170,000 and 70,000 teachers respectively, while in TRE-3 only 66,603 posts were filled against 87,774 vacancies