The road from Dhibra block to the high school in Auraiya village cuts through a pocket of Jamui district that still figures in the home ministry’s list of LWE (Left-Wing Extremism) affected areas. Until last year, the most common sight at dawn was a column of boys trudging barefoot, steel lunchboxes clanking against their thighs, while girls waited for a patriarchal escort or simply stayed home. That visual has been upended by a roar: 3,000 girls, aged 14 to 18, now zip down the same route astride Royal Enfield Bullets, chrome mudguards glinting in the sun, their khaki berets tilted at an angle that would make a drill major proud. They are the inaugural cohort of the Rani Lakshmi Bai Cadet Corps, a scheme launched in July 2025 by the Bihar government to combine mobility, martial training and academic mentorship for adolescent girls in 23 Naxal-affected blocks spread across Jamui, Gaya, Lakhisarai and Munger.
The idea was born out of a cruel irony: these blocks record the highest female school-dropout rate in the state—18.7 % between Grades 9 and 10—yet they also have the widest roads, built by the Border Roads Organisation for counter-insurgency logistics, perfect for motorcycle convoys. Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, while on a security review in 2024, asked a simple question: if the state can run free bicycle schemes in the plains, why not graduate to motorbikes where distance is the enemy? A pilot was sanctioned with ₹220 crore from the Central Road and Infrastructure Fund plus ₹80 crore from the state’s women-and-child development budget. The target: 5,000 girls in two years; the first 3,000 have already received their steeds.
Selection is ruthless. Applicants must have attended school for 75 % of the previous academic year, scored at least 60 % in science and mathematics, and secure written consent from parents who are famously sceptical of anything that involves engines and daughters. A three-day boot camp at the Bihar Police Academy tests physical endurance—5 km run in 35 minutes, 15 push-ups, 3-metre long jump—and mental agility through team-coordination games. From 9,200 applicants, 3,048 cleared the cut-off; the drop-outs during training—mostly due to height constraints—brought the final number to an even 3,000. Each girl is then handed a 350-cc Royal Enfield Bullet that has been slightly detuned to 20 bhp for fuel efficiency and fitted with an anti-lock braking system donated by Bosch India as part of its CSR mandate. The cost—₹1.95 lakh per bike—is split three ways: 50 % subsidy from the state, 30 % soft loan from Canara Bank at 4 % interest, and 20 % contribution raised through local alumni crowdfunding, ensuring community buy-in.
Training is conducted by a team of 42 women instructors, all of whom are serving Bihar Police sub-inspectors with national-level motor-sports credentials. Over six weeks the cadets learn defensive riding, field-repair of punctured tubes, map-reading using offline GPS, and, crucially, self-defence techniques drawn from the Israeli Krav Maga system. “The motorcycle is not a prop; it is a tool of liberation,” says Inspector Kiran Kumari, a three-time Raid-de-Himalaya champion who gave up a corporate career with Mahindra Adventure to return home. “When a girl can throttle-open on a deserted forest track and still feel safe, she rewires her internal ceiling.” The curriculum includes weekly counselling on menstrual hygiene, financial literacy and legal rights, delivered by mobile apps that work without data connectivity. Academic mentors—mostly postgraduate women from the same villages who made it to engineering or medical colleges—track each cadet’s homework submissions through a WhatsApp-based bot that reminds teachers to upload assignments and flags girls who miss two consecutive deadlines.
The academic payoff has been instant. Attendance in the 23 target schools has jumped from 71 % in 2023-24 to 93 % in 2025-26, while the dropout rate has fallen to 4.1 %, lower than the state average. More remarkably, 1,700 of the 3,000 girls scored 75 % or above in the half-yearly board pattern exam, a threshold that makes them eligible for the state’s new merit-cum-means scholarship that pays ₹1,000 a month through college. The security dividend is harder to quantify but equally real. Police intelligence reports show a 22 % decline in Naxal recruitment activities in the target blocks; district superintendents attribute the drop to the visibility of uniformed girls who act as informal eyes and ears, reporting suspicious movements during their daily rides. The cadets are not armed, but they are linked to the local thana through a dedicated 24-hour helpline, and their bikes carry a GPS tracker that transmits location every 60 seconds to a control room staffed entirely by women constables.
The economic ripple is beginning to surface. Royal Enfield’s monthly sales in Bihar jumped 38 % after the scheme was announced, forcing the company to open a new service centre at Jhajha that employs 60 mechanics, 18 of them women who graduated from the cadet-training module. Riding gear—helmets, knee guards, reflective jackets—has spawned a micro-industry of 14 MSMEs in Bhagalpur that together log ₹4 crore in annual revenue. A local petrol pump reported a 17 % increase in premium-fuel sales, attributing it to “girls who insist on the high-octane stuff because the manual says so.” Even the forest department has benefited: the cadets act as volunteer forest-fire watchers during summer, each bike covering a 15-km beat that would otherwise require a petrol-guzzling jeep.
The future roadmap is ambitious. The government has sanctioned an expansion to 10,000 girls by 2027 and is negotiating with the Indian Army to reserve 5 % of the annual women-soldier recruitment quota for cadet-corps alumni. A tie-up with the paramilitary Assam Rifles will offer a direct-entry pipeline for 250 riders every year, complete with a starting salary of ₹47,000 a month—more than what an experienced school teacher earns in the region. Plans are afoot to introduce electric motorcycles in the next batch, funded by a grant from Energy Efficiency Services Limited, which will convert one block into a zero-carbon mobility laboratory. And in a symbolic nod to history, the corps will lead the Republic Day parade in Patna on 26 January 2026, throttle-open down the same arterial road where Naxal posters once warned “outsiders” to stay away.