India, Nov. 5 -- Back in 2010, I, like scores of development researchers and policy wonks, was a frequent traveller to rural Bihar. The joke was that if you wanted a job in "development", all you had to do was to stand in Patna's (then rickety) airport. There were no fancy hotels, malls or highways, but Bihar was abuzz with possibility. "Sushasan Babu" - Nitish Kumar - had won a landslide re-election.

Credited with freeing Bihar from the dark days of "jungle raj", his second term held the promise of transformation based on a politics that married social justice with material progress. Women were at the centre of this promise through a triad of path-breaking interventions from enhancing access to education (every morning as we set out to ...