What It Takes to Stay in School: Breaking the Economics of Inequality in Bihar 

A child in rural Bihar drops out of school at Grade 5, not because they don’t value education, but because staying in school costs too much. By age ten, a child becomes a valuable worker on the farm. For lower‑caste families whose income depends on a single landowner, the decision to pull a child out of school is not cultural; it is economic. Intergenerational poverty persists because families are forced into economic decision‑making under constraint. 

This became the starting point for our project, which was developed and delivered to complete the UN International Project Programme at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, this past April. 

Designing a solution: The Bihar Integrated Mobility Initiative (BIMI) 

We introduced the Bihar Integrated Mobility Initiative (BIMI) as a structural intervention aimed at breaking this cycle by removing the opportunity cost of education and expanding long-term economic mobility. 

The model operates through three components: 

• Direct Opportunity Cost Subsidy (DOCS): a stipend that replaces the income a child would otherwise earn through labour. 

• Guaranteed Artisan Cooperative (GAC): a partnership with local Madhubani painters, primarily women and mothers, whose work is culturally significant but economically undervalued. By establishing a stable buyer pipeline, household income increases while preserving traditional craft. 

• Merit-Based Mobility Pipeline: students who perform in the top 25th percentile on the national NTA exam receive full scholarships and pathways into civil service careers. 

The evidence: How BIMI works 

To test its impact, a major part of our presentation was to include an analysis to gain support. We ran multi-regression with fixed effects and instrumental variables across 38 districts in Bihar, accounting for historical caste exclusion, school quality, infrastructure, land income, and parental literacy. 

Ultimately, our analysis showed that receiving DOCS adds 4.85 additional years of schooling on average and graduation rates for the lowest income decile rise from 14% to nearly 70%.  

In addition, with our predictions. Household income increases between 40% and 375%, depending on artisan participation and stipend uptake. 

In doing so, these students do not become a +1 in the system, but precedents. Their success shifts expectations for entire communities. Moving away from one-off subsidy, we expressed significance in the self-reinforcing mobility loop where: artisan income rises through GAC, DOCS remove the labour cost of keeping children in school, students stay in school longer and graduate at higher rates, become more integrated into the civil service, grow representation resulting in policy shifts as BIMI expands, and ultimately, the next generation faces fewer structural barriers. These align with SDG 10.2 and 10.3, addressing inequality of opportunity, not just inequality of income.  

This is what it means to operationalize an SDG: not just addressing a symptom, butsymptom but altering the system that produces it.  

Beyond SDG10: Dynamic Synergies Across the SDGs 

During the remote arm of this program, my team and I were focused on resolving SDG10. However, during our time taking part in expert-led workshops, we began to see BIMI not just as an SDG10 intervention, but as a node in a larger system.  

In particular, we participated in the 2030 SDGs Game, a simulation designed to mimic the real-world complexity of sustainable development, making decisions under limited time and resources, and competing priorities. A project that boosted economic growth (SDG8) could unintentionally increase emissions (SDG13). A well-intentioned education initiative (SDG 4) could fail if gender barriers (SDG 5) or income inequality (SDG 10) remained unaddressed. 

This is exactly where BMI comes in. What we saw was that SDG 10 is structural; it is a node to which one can unlock progress across the entire system. By targeting structural inequality, it unlocks progress across multiple goals: 

• Reduced poverty (SDG 1) through income stabilization 

• Improved education outcomes (SDG 4) via reduced opportunity cost 

• Increased economic agency for women (SDG 5) 

• Fairer market participation for artisans (SDG 8), increasing their share of retail value from ~12% to 45% 

• Preservation of sustainable cultural production (SDG 12) 

Reflecting on the week in Geneva 

Through sessions on multilateral diplomacy, negotiation, and decision-making, one insight became clear: operationalizing the SDGs requires anticipating trade-offs, aligning incentives among actors, and designing systems in which gains in one area reinforce progress in others. 

Moving Forward 

What stayed with me most from Geneva wasn’t just the frameworks or simulations, but the people. Being surrounded by 25 individuals from 10+ countries, each bringing different experiences, disciplines, and ambitions, reshaped how I think about global change. It no longer felt abstract; it felt collective. 

Those conversations didn’t end when the program did. Instead, they evolved into action. Together, we began building the Multilateral Diplomacy Institute, a non-profit grounded in the same idea that shaped BIMI: that meaningful change requires not just good intentions, but systems that can sustain them.