Friends of
Bihar
For the people who never stopped believing Bihar could lead.
Join the Circle →
Bihar's question is not
resources. It is
institutions.
For a state that produces more civil servants, more engineers, and more migrant talent per capita than most of India, Bihar is curiously under-served by the kinds of small, serious institutions that turn ideas into outcomes.
Friends of Bihar begins from a simple observation. Across India's policy capitals — Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai — there are dozens of institutions doing the patient work of convening experts, shaping debate, and translating ideas into reform. In Patna, that ecosystem is thin. The result is a state whose policy conversations happen elsewhere, about it, but rarely from within it.
Friends of Bihar is not a think-tank, and it is not an NGO. It is a network — a circle of people, Bihari and otherwise, who believe Bihar's future deserves more careful thinking, more honest convening, and more durable institutions than it currently receives.
Our starting frame is education and skilling — the policy question on which the state's next decade will turn, and the one where the gap between ambition and architecture is widest. We expect to widen that frame as the network grows.
Five pillars. Five ways in.
The Circle of Friends
The Policy Corner
The Annual Bihar Lectures
Letter from Bihar
The Bihar Review
Three flagship initiatives.
Didi Udyam The Jeevika Incubator
The Local Leaders Programme Panchayat & Municipal
The Bihar Story A Podcast
A network, built
one person at a time.
Friends of Bihar is open to anyone who cares about the state's future. There is no application, no vetting, no fee — and the Circle is non-political by design.
Letter from Bihar
A monthly letter on what's worth knowing from Bihar — the moves, the shifts, the data, and the people quietly building things. Delivered to your inbox.
The Bihar Review
Every quarterly policy paper — a single pressing question worked to a verdict — sent to Members ahead of wider circulation.
The Annual Lectures
Invitations to both flagship lectures each year in Patna — the Dinkar Lecture and the Bhikhari Thakur Lecture.
This is for you,
and it is from you.
To the people of Bihar — every doctor who left for Delhi but still calls home every week. Every farmer's daughter quietly topping the UPSC. Every teacher in a government school who shows up even when no one is watching. Every migrant worker who built someone else's city before returning to build his own. Every young person in Patna or Purnea or Gaya wondering whether their state will ever be ready for them.
Friends of Bihar exists because of you. Because the institutions, the ideas, the networks that will shape the next decades of this state are being built now — by people who chose to stay, by people who chose to return, and by people who never left in their hearts.
We hope to be one of those institutions. We hope you will be one of those people.
If this resonates, we should speak.
The first invitation is not to fund or endorse — but to think alongside us about what serious institution-building looks like for Bihar in this decade.