Jaydip Parikh

This Diwali, this one is for everyone who has ever been written off. A museum in Patna now ranks above the Met in New York and the Louvre in Paris. The Bihar Museum is 9th on the World’s 100 Best Museums list for 2026 put out by the German travel guide Worth a Journey. The Met is 10th and the Louvre is 31st. No other Indian museum made it to the list and no museum in Asia ranked higher. I am celebrating along with every Bihari I know. But this museum came very close to never being built. It stands today because a Chief Minister and a civil servant refused to let it die. The Chief Minister at the time was Nitish Kumar. The civil servant was Chanchal Kumar of the 1992 IAS batch. A lot of people asked whether Bihar really needed a world-class museum when Nitish ji proposed it. Who was going to come? Why put Rs 498 crore into a museum? Some of the doubters were from within the political establishment. Nitish ji stood by the idea. What followed was one fight after another. The museum needed a plot that had 7 government bungalows on it. A minister and an IAS officer were two of the people living there. Some others, the Chief Commissioner of Income Tax among them, refused to leave their government-allotted homes. The state had to fight a case in the High Court before construction could begin. Men linked to MLAs stormed the site on the very first day of work to demand subcontracts and the police had to arrest them. Court cases challenged its cost and the way the tenders were handled. In India, many projects have been shelved for far smaller problems. This one survived largely because it was run cleanly. Some of the biggest firms in the business took part in tenders that were national or international and run in the open. The court went through the physical files and found the process sound. The costs came in lower than for similar projects abroad. Larsen & Toubro came to Bihar for the first time to build it. The design came from Fumihiko Maki of Japan who had won the Pritzker Prize, which is considered to be the Nobel for architecture. The responsibility of building it was given to Chanchal Kumar. He held an unusual double charge as Secretary of Art and Culture and Secretary of the Building Construction Department at the same time. One department had to decide what the museum would be and what it would hold while the other had to build it. I can’t think of a tougher pair of jobs for one person. I recently read his account of the whole journey. He and his team were up against a great deal and yet he speaks very little of his own contribution to the success. He is not the sort to go around telling people what he did. So I am telling it here. His job was to take a big idea through files, approvals, tenders and court hearings until it became a building and then an institution. None of it would have happened without Nitish ji. It was his idea and he backed it all the way. It also helped that Chanchal Kumar had worked in the Chief Minister’s Office and knew how to get past the roadblocks. The team around the two of them could have given up when the pressure built up but they stayed. Those early doubts are the reason I think this museum matters so much. Biharis have done well in every field and in every part of the world we have gone to. What held the state back was how the rest of India saw it and how many of us had started to see ourselves. A museum felt like a luxury to people who had been told for years that Bihar had nothing worth showing. There is a moment in the Ramayan that comes to mind. Ram ji’s Vanara Sena stands on the seashore wondering who can cross the ocean to Lanka. Hanuman ji sits apart with no idea of his own strength. It is then that the old bear king Jambavan reminds him who he is by telling him about his childhood and how he once leapt at the sun thinking it was a fruit. Only then does Hanuman ji realise his own potential and strength. Bihar needed a Jambavan of its own.

Only one word for @krishnabgowda Sir - respect and RESPECT. He is the role model for the youth to look up to. #TechSparks