Bihar Legislative Assembly Election, October-November 2020

Floods (and Covid-19), July 2020 

Monsoon rainfall caused flooding in northeastern India beginning in July 2020, reaching the “Severe Flood Stage” in Bihar by mid-July as rivers surpassed their safe capacity (FloodList 2020a). By July 25, the Bihar Disaster Management Department reported that 960,000 people were affected by floods (FloodList 2020b). The state government initiated several steps for flood rescue and rehabilitation including deployment of 13 National Disaster Response Force teams and eight State Disaster Response Force teams (Tripathi 2020). While annual flooding is normal, the scale of floods during July 2020 was unusual (UNICEF 2020a). 

In addition to the flooding, India surpassed one million cases of Covid-19 in July of 2020, ranking third in the world for infection rates behind the USA and Brazil (Singh and Gettleman 2020). The combination of severe flooding in Bihar and the pandemic exacerbated risks to health (UNICEF 2020b), partly because in the flood-affected areas it had become ‘nearly impossible’ to follow social distancing guidelines as thousands of displaced people crowded into government shelters and relief camps (Mishra and Singh 2020). 

Impact on the electoral process  

The state assembly election in Bihar had three phases of polling. The first was planned for 28 October (for 71 seats), the second for 3 November (for 94 seats), and the third for 7 November 7 (for 78 seats) – to elect the 243-member assembly (Kumar 2020). River water levels were still dangerously high, leading up to the election but showed a decreasing trend; Water Resources Department officials reported that the flood situation was ‘under control’ across Bihar (Kumar 2020). 

Most of the polling stations were in schools and long school closures due to Covid-19 meant these sites were dirty even before accumulation of mud from flooding. Restoration of voting infrastructure within a short span of time amidst threat of infectious disease was a huge task (Disaster Management Dept 2020).  

In 12 districts infrastructure including roads, bridges and schools was damaged, which led the electoral authorities to create and publicize auxiliary polling stations – 33,792 of these were set up in addition to the 72,723 main polling stations. This challenge involved identifying over 2,500 additional buildings and the same number of additional booth level officers for voter verification, as well as ‘convincing the public whose livelihood was severely impacted due to the flood to participate in democratic process’ (Ambarkhane 2024). Further, a large number of migrant workers originally from Bihar had returned to the state due to lack of jobs during Covid-19. Hence, a special registration drive was conducted to enroll them in time for the elections (Ambarkhane 2021).   

Despite the tight timescale for the above, the 10 most flood-affected managed to increase voter turnout between 0.4 and 3.4 per cent as compared with Bihar’s previous election (ECI 2021). Voter turnout was 57.05 per cent, slightly up on 56.66 per cent turnout in the 2015 election (Ramashankar 2020).