E-Paper
Are constituencies in Bihar cast in stone? | Number Theory
While the caste-survey data is extremely useful in making state-wide analysis, it has an important limitation because no granular data was published in report
These pages have dealt with the importance of caste in Bihar’s political competition in detail on the basis of two databases – a historical database of Bihar’s 3629 MLAs from 1962-2020 and 498 candidates of the two major alliances in the 2025 election – prepared by the first author of this story. They have also married these statistics along with other statistics on Bihar to build a larger political economy narrative in another three-part series. This analysis was facilitated by the fact that Bihar is the only state which has disaggregated data of a recent vintage at the sub-caste or jati level thanks to the caste survey conducted by the Government of Bihar in 2023. While the caste-survey data is extremely useful in making state-wide analysis, it has an important limitation because no granular data, even at the district level, was published in the report.
