Major Schemes of Bihar: Saat Nischay, Jeevika and PYQs

Bihar’s welfare programmes are built around two names that every state examination asks about: the Saat Nischay, the seven resolves taken up from 2016 and extended as Saat Nischay-2 in 2020, and Jeevika, the rural livelihoods society whose self-help groups of women reach almost every village. Around these sit the schemes for girls, for the old, for first-generation entrepreneurs and for water and greenery. BPSC, BSSC, Bihar Police and SSC papers ask the resolve a scheme belongs to, the amount it pays, the age or class of the beneficiary and the department that runs it, so this chapter is best learnt as a map of schemes grouped under their resolve.

The seven resolves and what each contains

The first resolve carries the three schemes asked about most. The Bihar Student Credit Card Yojana gives an education loan of up to Rs 4 lakh for higher study after the intermediate, guaranteed by the state through the Bihar State Education Finance Corporation, at four per cent simple interest, reduced to one per cent for women, transgender applicants and the differently abled. The Kushal Yuva Program trains young people at Kushal Yuva Kendras in life and behavioural skills, in communication in Hindi and English and in the use of a computer. The Mukhyamantri Nishchay Swayam Sahayata Bhatta pays Rs 1,000 a month for up to two years to an intermediate-passed youth between twenty and twenty-five who is neither employed nor studying, on condition of joining the skills programme. Under the second resolve the state reserved thirty-five per cent of posts in its services for women; it had already reserved fifty per cent of panchayat seats for women from the elections of 2006, the first state in India to do so.

Saat Nischay-2

A second set of seven resolves was announced in 2020 and carries the programme forward: skills and enterprise for the youth, a stronger place for women in work and self-employment, irrigation water to every field, clean and prosperous villages, clean and developed towns, easier connectivity by road, and health services within reach of everyone. In practice this has meant more technical institutions, more support for self-help groups and producer companies, irrigation and solar pump work, village sanitation and solid waste management, urban drainage and sewerage, new roads and bridges, and the strengthening of health sub-centres and hospitals. The names of the first seven resolves are asked more often than those of the second set, but the subjects of the second set are asked as the state’s current priorities.

Jeevika and the self-help groups

Jeevika is the working name of the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Promotion Society, set up under the Rural Development Department with World Bank assistance and now the state agency for the national rural livelihoods mission, renamed the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana, National Rural Livelihoods Mission. Its design is a pyramid: self-help groups of about a dozen women at the hamlet level, village organisations above them, and cluster level federations above those, with savings, internal lending and bank credit at every stage. Its members, the Jeevika Didi, have moved well beyond thrift and credit into running Didi ki Rasoi canteens, supplying seeds, making and selling sanitary napkins, keeping books and taking up village-level health and nutrition work. The Satat Jeevikoparjan Yojana works at the bottom of this pyramid: it identifies the very poorest households, including those that earned from making or selling liquor before prohibition came into force in April 2016, and gives each an asset, consumption support for the first months, training and hand-holding until a lasting livelihood takes hold.

Girls, entrepreneurs, the old and the environment

The state’s girl child package has three parts. The Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojana of 2006 gave money for a bicycle to girls entering Class 9, a step that raised enrolment and retention at the secondary stage and was later extended to boys; the Poshak Yojana pays for school uniforms; and the Mukhyamantri Kanya Utthan Yojana pays a girl in instalments from birth through her school years and on passing the intermediate and graduating. For enterprise, the Mukhyamantri Udyami Yojana allows a project of up to Rs 10 lakh for a new unit and gives half of it, up to Rs 5 lakh, as a subsidy, the rest being a loan at a nominal rate, with separate windows for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe, Extremely Backward Class, women and youth entrepreneurs. The Mukhyamantri Vridhjan Pension Yojana pays a monthly pension to everyone above sixty regardless of income, the amount being revised by the state from time to time, and the Bal Hriday Yojana pays for the heart surgery of children. The Jal-Jeevan-Hariyali Abhiyan, launched in 2019, works on the revival of ponds, wells and ahar-pyne channels, rainwater harvesting, solar energy and tree planting, and it is the scheme most often asked from the environmental side of the state’s programmes.