As the smooth tarred road to Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar’s village snakes through vast crop fields, reflectors with red, white and yellow stripes — a rare sight in the state’s interior — guide the traveller.

Kalyan Bigha village in Nalanda district has a middle school and a higher secondary school in addition to an industrial training institute and a referral hospital. The buildings are sturdy and well maintained unlike most government property elsewhere.

A power sub-station, a police station and an indoor shooting range are a short distance away. The village has a park with an open-air gymnasium, and a second park that displays busts of Nitish’s parents Parameshwari Devi and Kaviraj Ram Lakhan Singh and the chief minister’s wife Manju Devi.

The village is surprisingly spick and span. All the houses have toilets. The lanes are concrete, the drains either running underground or covered with cement slabs. The round-the-clock tap water is an advertisement for Nitish’s “seven resolves for a developed Bihar”.

Kalyan Bigha, around 65km southeast of Patna, stands as an example of what Bihar’s villages should be like.

A knot of villagers is discussing the elections under a tree in front of the Durga temple for which Nitish donated a portion of his homestead land.

“What did you expect? After all, this is the chief minister’s village. We have no problems here. We have water and electricity 24 hours a day,” Janardan Singh tells The Telegraph.

Asked about the “quality” of the development, the group of villagers is unanimous in dismissing any hint of corruption.

“The government officials and contractors would not dare execute anything of poor quality here. One complaint will send them to jail,” one of them says as the others nod.

“Nitish Kumar comes here thrice every year. He keeps a watch on everything.”

About 25km away, Musahri village in Domagram panchayat, Patna district, too provides an example — of all that’s wrong in Bihar.

Its narrow, poorly tarred road fades into puffs of dust before reaching the village. Its last stretch lies incomplete. The stench from the excrement drying on both sides of the path comes as a warning for the first-time visitor.

Open defecation is the norm here. “Where should we and our children relieve ourselves if not in the open?” says Rinku Devi.

“When we heard the government would help build toilets, we pleaded with the mukhiya (panchayat chief) and all the government officials we met. Nothing happened. Many families here lack toilets; the rest built them on their own.”

The Kalyan Bigha village in Nalanda district Telegraph picture

Government data claim the Swachh Bharat Mission Grameen (rural) has achieved its target of providing toilets to all the households in every district in Bihar.

In Musahri, the paved lanes and drains — part of Nitish’s “seven resolves” — have been built half-heartedly. The drains are incomplete and uncovered at places. A ramshackle community building, built decades ago, stands abandoned.

The tap water is erratic. The contractors, instead of building a proper grid of pipes connected at right angles, have bent the plastic pipes to somehow divert them directly to homes. The villagers are unsure how long the twisted pipes would last. Some of the houses have hand pumps.

“This water supply scheme, combined with the incomplete drainage, causes much conflict in the village. Families fight when drain water accumulates or overflows near their homes. Government schemes should be properly implemented,” says Lalan Singh, a farmer in Musahri.

He alleges that local MLA and BJP politician Vinay Bhushan aka Lallu Mukhiya never visited the village in the past five years.

Musahri perhaps provides a truer picture than Kalyan Bigha of the state Nitish has ruled for most of the last 15 years, and which now has a chance to give its verdict on the last 5 years of his reign.

Musahri voted on October 28 while Kalyan Bigha will speak its mind on November 3. The three-phase elections end on November 7.

It’s villages like Musahri that have given the Rashtriya Janata Dal, Congress and the Lok Janshakti Party the chance to allege corruption in government schemes by a nexus of ministers, officials, elected representatives and contractors.

Raids that the income-tax department conducted on several contractors in Bihar over the past two days have provided ammunition for Nitish’s rivals.

The tax officials claim to have detected undisclosed income of Rs 75 crore, seized Rs 3.21 crore in cash and frozen fixed deposits of Rs 30 crore.

Some of the raided contractors have been involved in implementing the state government’s development schemes, such as tap water projects.