Chief Minister Nitish Kumar government has come out with a new domicile policy under which 85 per cent seats in recruitment of government teachers will be reserved for “native residents” of the state.
“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 proposal for giving preference to native residents of the state in teachers’ recruitment exams was cleared. Already more than 50 per cent of seats are reserved for the state’s residents. This is because quotas for SCs, STs, OBCs and Extremely Backwards Classes account for nearly 50 per cent, while another 10 per cent is reserved for the economically weaker sections,” PTI quoted Additional Chief Secretary (Cabinet Secretariat) S Siddharth as saying.
35% reservation for women in government jobs
Siddharth stated that an additional 35 per cent has been reserved for women, and the government has already decided that only state residents will be eligible under this quota.
“Of the remaining seats, 40 per cent shall now be reserved for native residents of Bihar, who completed their class 10 and class 12 in the state. So the quota for native residents effectively will be more than 85 per cent,” he added.
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.
The 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”.
Opposition parties pitch for 100% reservation for locals
Leader of Opposition Tejashwi Yadav of the RJD and Jan Suraaj chief Prashant Kishor have been among prominent politicians backing the demand for some time, with Yadav previously even promising 100% reservation across all jobs if the RJD comes to power in the coming polls.
Reacting to the announcement, Tejashwi again accused the NDA government of copying the Opposition’s agenda.
In a social media post, he said, “It is a matter of immense delight that the ideologically bankrupt NDA government, which used to outright reject our demand to implement the domicile policy in Bihar and boasted in the Assembly that it would never implement such a policy under any circumstances, is now copying this announcement just like they have imitated our other schemes.”
He added, “It is clear that this copycat NDA government of 20 years has no policy, vision, or direction of its own. The people of Bihar are enjoying watching a government, which in twenty years couldn’t figure out what to do or what not to do, now dance to our cues, demands, and announcements.”
At the same time, LJP (Ram Vilas) chief Chirag Paswan, who is a constituent of the NDA, said, “The NDA government in Bihar, led by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, has taken the historic decision to implement a domicile policy in Bihar. I and my party…welcome and support this decision. This will give priority to the local youth in state government jobs. This decision is a major initiative by the government to connect local unemployed youth to government jobs in Bihar. I had also been making a longstanding and widespread demand for the implementation of a domicile policy in the state, which the government has now started to implement in the education sector.”
