Bihar’s schools offer population solution

India’s poorest state plans to build 1,000 secondary schools a year for five years in an effort to educate more girls and so curb unsustainable population growth, according to Nitish Kumar, Bihar’s chief minister.

In the decade to 2011, the population of Bihar – a primarily agricultural region along the Ganges in northern India – increased by more than a quarter to nearly 104m. That increase of 21m people is roughly the population of Australia, and Bihar now has more than twice as many inhabitants as Spain.

“The big problem is the increasing numbers of the population,” Mr Kumar told the Financial Times in an interview in Patna, the state capital. “So we have to stabilise it . . . And women’s education is a must for stabilising population.”

With an average of 3.7 children over a woman’s lifetime, Bihar is the state with the highest fertility rate in India, according to official statistics. Bihar’s population grew 2.2 per cent annually over the past decade, compared with 1.6 per cent for India as a whole.

Mr Kumar said the fertility rate – the number of children per woman – typically fell to about two when girls had completed two years of secondary education. “And we came to this conclusion that unless we provide education to all our girl children this population cannot be controlled,” he said.

“Nowadays we require more than 8,000 secondary schools. At this point in time we have 3,000 plus . . . So we are making our plans to open at least 1,000 schools every year.”

Mr Kumar, who is seen as a possible future prime minister of India, has made Bihar’s economy the fastest-growing Indian state since he won power in 2005 and is credited with restoring order and good governance to what was one of India’s most corrupt and violent states.

One of his strategies has been to promote women’s education in a very traditional north Indian society, by providing girls with free school uniforms and bicycles as an incentive for families to send their daughters to school. Bihar has also reserved half of its teaching posts and half of the seats in elected local government bodies for women.

Bihar’s ability to provide services to its inhabitants, however, is constantly under threat from the rapid expansion of its population.

In many southern Indian states such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu, fertility rates and population growth have declined sharply and the population is set to stabilise, partly as a result of urbanisation and better education.

But growth in the number of inhabitants in the north will push India to overtake China as the world’s most populous nation in about 2025, and the Indian population is set to rise to more than 1.7bn before levelling off in the second half of the century.