PK

The world's most compelling Democratic experiment of the past many decades is currently underway in Bihar, home to nearly 140 million people. For nearly three years, Prashant Kishor (PK) has been walking across villages of this predominantly rural state, listening to people, drawing up local plans based on an understanding of the local issues, identifying local leaders, and urging voters to prioritize education and employment over identity and spectacle. What began as a long march of conversations culminated into Jan Suraaj, a political party that now claims more than ten million members. Formally launched last year, the party is contesting the Bihar elections now underway.

Bihar in Numbers

The per capita income in Bihar is less than a third of the national average (NITI Aayog). In rural Bihar, more than a quarter of the kids in eighth standard cannot fluently read a Grade 2 text in their regional language; barely 63 percent can do a basic division problem (ASER 2024; PDF). About 7% of the population lives outside Bihar for work or education (The Indian Express). Because most migrants are working-age men, nearly one in four men of working age spends most of the year away from home. Across districts, a majority of reproductive age women are anemic (see below; Data.gov.in).

Of the flip side, CAGR for Bihar since 2011 has been upward of 11% (here).

What the Current Statistics Miss

Or the Case for Deeper Measures

PK argues that the situation on the ground is worse than what the statistics reveal. He often illustrates this gap with stories from his padyatra (walk). At one campaign stop, he recalls sitting next to a boy who was eating rapidly. Curious, he asked how much he could eat. The boy replied that he wasn’t sure; it had never happened that his stomach was full while food was still left in the pot.

He tells other stories that reveal the quiet realities behind the numbers. He relates instances where he met boys who looked like they are in the sixth grade but were in fact in the ninth grade. He relates stories of villages absent of working age men, of seeing that nearly all older women have a stooped back or difficulty walking, likely because of years of anemia, osteoporosis, and the kind of work they have had to do. He also talks about the wretchedness of having to live on a pension of ₹400 a month. That is about 15 cents a day. (In June 2025, mostly as a result of PK's campaigning, the government raised social security pensions to ₹1,100.)

Others have used similar informal markers of progress. In 2005, Shekhar Gupta noted that many people at Bihar’s political rallies were barefoot and that the village walls carried no advertisements because people were too poor to buy much. By 2010, that had changed. Villagers mostly had slippers. By 2015, many people had smartphones (see here; YT video). Yet even then, the walls were covered with posters for exam-coaching classes for low-end government jobs. The situation remains the same in 2025.

I have been working on my own ways to measure what the usual statistics overlook. In Delhi, I tried measuring the proportion of women on the streets in Delhi to measure missing women in public life (see here). More recently, together with Varun K.R., I have been working on an extension where where we pay someone to ride a bike with a GoPro between random sets of coordinates and then derive new development, environment, health, and dignity metrics that conventional statistics miss.

The Method and PK's Mental Model of Politics

PK is not a revolutionary. Revolutions, he says, can topple governments but rarely transform societies. His project is to do the harder thing: to change society itself.

He takes inspiration from Gandhi. Gandhi was less a freedom fighter in the narrow sense of someone fighting to expel the British and more a social reformer with complex, sometimes flawed, ideas about economics and nation-building. His central pursuit was moral: persuading people to become better versions of themselves—less bound by caste, greed, and fear.

PK’s mission echoes that impulse, though in a modern key. His appeal is not to saintliness but to citizenship. He wants people to become better citizens by becoming more demanding voters. At every stop, his message is simple: politicians deliver on what they promise, and what they promise reflects the equilibrium between voter demand and party competition. The BJP promised the Ram temple in Ayodhya, and it delivered. If JD (U) promised electricity, people got that. What they have not demanded, he says, are good schools and secure jobs for their children. Until voters insist on those, politics will remain trapped in the exchange of small favors for large hopes.

This is the demand-side of his theory. Alongside this sits a supply-side intervention. He argues that citizens cannot make better choices if they have no good alternatives (there is some unstated story of capture here). His answer is Jan Suraaj, a political party designed to be a credible option rather than just a protest. Its structure aims for internal democracy and meritocracy—local leaders selected for competence, not lineage or patronage. Each unit is meant to stay rooted in the problems of its village or block, so that political organization and problem-solving are directly linked.

What Others Can Learn

Most political campaigns today operate on a narrow, election-focused logic: identify persuadable voters, target them cheaply, and move on. The harder and more expensive work—of shaping how people think about politics itself—has been largely abandoned. PK’s project challenges that default. It treats persuasion not as a marginal add-on but as the core of democratic renewal.

The problem, as he sees it, is collective. Parties and candidates all benefit from a more informed and aspirational electorate, but none can justify the upfront cost of creating one. It is a kind of political tragedy of the commons. Everyone free-rides on the same shallow pool of civic understanding. PK’s campaign is an attempt to deepen that pool through scale and patience—village by village, voter by voter.

His method suggests what others might do differently: invest in civic demand, not just electoral arithmetic; build organizations that talk about first principles, not just last-mile delivery; and remember that the most durable political advantage comes from teaching people what to want, not only how to vote.