On paper, Bihar is dry. In practice, the state is anything but so. A decade after prohibition was imposed in April 2016, the National Family Health Survey-6 (NFHS-6) suggests alcohol is far from vanishing in Bihar.
The finding, based on self-reported behaviour by the 15+ age group, says 16.5 per cent of men in Bihar consume alcohol. Among rural men, the figure rises to 17.1 per cent; in urban Bihar, it is 12.8 per cent. It is, however, pertinent to note that NFHS-6 does not interview every individual in Bihar. Rather, it surveys a scientifically selected, representative sample of households and uses statistical weights and sampling techniques to generate state-level estimates.
Therefore, the figure of 16.5 per cent should be understood as an estimate of alcohol consumption prevalence among Bihar’s male population aged 15 years and above rather than a headcount or direct enumeration of every individual in the state. For women, the number is miniscule—0.4 per cent in the state as a whole—but even there, the survey registers the stubborn fact of continued consumption. Overall, the picture is certainly not one of abstinence.
NFHS-6 was conducted in 2023-24 by the Union ministry of health and family welfare, with the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, serving as the nodal agency. Covering nearly 679,000 households across 715 districts countrywide, the survey is among India’s most comprehensive exercises in collecting data on population, health, nutrition and family welfare indicators. Its findings, released on May 29, are widely used by governments and policymakers for evidence-based planning down to the district level.
That is what makes the numbers politically awkward. Bihar’s prohibition law was never merely a public health measure. It was a moral and electoral statement, a promise that the state would intervene decisively to maintain the social order disturbed by rampant alcoholism. For a time, that promise carried enormous political value. It allowed Nitish Kumar, as chief minister, to present himself as a reformer willing to challenge the old, hard-drinking masculinity of the bazaar and the fields. It offered women’s groups a language of household protection. It gave the state a new identity: disciplined, corrective and, at least in theory, dry.
But the gap between law and answer is where the story lives. Bihar’s 16.5 per cent figure for men consuming alcohol does not prove prohibition has failed. It suggests, however, that prohibition has not succeeded in the absolute terms its supporters often imply. In a state of more than 130 million people, even a modest percentage translates into an immense number of drinkers, hidden consumers, occasional users and socially obliged participants.
The trend is perhaps even more striking than the absolute number. When NFHS-5 was conducted during 2019-21, 15.4 per cent of Bihar’s men aged 15 and above reported consuming alcohol. Two years later, NFHS-6 puts the figure 1.1 percentage points higher. In statistical terms, the rise may appear modest. Politically, however, it is significant, for the finding raises uncomfortable questions about whether prohibition has merely driven hidden drinking rather than eliminating it altogether.
The rural-urban split is revealing. Rural Bihar reports higher alcohol consumption than cities. That should surprise no one. Liquor is procured through informal networks, consumed away from the obvious gaze and denied with equal conviction when someone in authority comes calling. Prohibition tends to produce a new rural economy: one built on concealment, transport, intermediaries and quiet arrangements between those who enforce the rule and those who live around it.
This is where the NFHS-6 report becomes more than a catalogue of numbers. Bihar’s prohibition regime has always had two lives. The first is public: raids, seizures, arrests, police statements, ministerial resolve. The second is private: the bottle in the back room, the home brew, the truck driver’s evening ritual, the labourer’s weekend escape, the wedding after-party.
The state may call it an offence. Many citizens treat it as a fact. That tension is especially sharp where social life is intensely stratified. For some men, alcohol is linked to leisure, bravado or release. For some households, it is a ularly in marginalised communities, it can be entangled with migration, precariat and masculine performance.
There is also the question of women, which prohibition supporters often place at the centre of their argument. Bihar’s female alcohol consumption rate remains extremely low in NFHS-6, and that in itself is politically convenient for the law’s defenders. But even a small number matters because prohibition in Bihar has always been sold not only as temperance policy but as social rescue. The state promised to protect women from the violence, debt and volatility associated with male drinking. That promise still resonates. Many women continue to support prohibition precisely because they have experienced its absence in the household as a burden. For them, the law has been a guardrail.
And yet the survey numbers complicate the idea that the law has delivered. If 16.5 per cent of men still report drinking, then the law has not eliminated the behaviour it sought to suppress. It may have pushed it underground. It may have made drinking less visible and more expensive. It may even have made the market more dangerous, with illicit liquor replacing regulated supply. But it has not erased the practice from the social landscape.
That is the paradox of Bihar’s prohibition story. It survives because it still carries moral force, especially among women and poorer households that see some benefit in a stricter public order. It endures because it can be presented as a sign of government seriousness. And yet it is routinely undercut by the lived reality that the law’s reach is incomplete. Bihar is not unique in this. Prohibition anywhere tends to produce a theatre of compliance and a shadow world of practice. What makes Bihar interesting is the scale of the political investment in the idea that it could be different.
The NFHS-6 figures are a reminder. They show that policy rhetoric and social behaviour are rarely synchronised. They also show that the state’s self-y in law, but the numbers suggest it remains damp at the edges, soaked through by habit, necessity, discretion and denial.
That is why the phrase ‘dry state, wet reality’ works. It captures not just contradiction but a kind of administrative melancholy. The law exists. The culture persists. The survey records the distance between the two. And in Bihar, that distance is still very much alive.
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