For the BBC’s A Richer World season, journalist Rupa Jha travels to the heart of India – to the ramshackle city of Patna – to follow the day-to-day life of four citizens as she uncovers some of the issues confronting the ordinary people who live and work there.

Patna is the city of my birth. Every time I return there I get this slight rush of excitement and anticipation over what might have changed – and I always hope it will be for the better.

I left the city almost two and a half decades ago in search of better opportunities – similar to most educated people of my generation. Years later, they still seem to be doing the same. I feel comfortable when I come home, but I do not feel comfortable about the images most people seem to have – of corruption, bureaucratic red-tape, rotten infrastructure and poverty. These days I travel all over India and hear plenty of people talking about “shining India” or “Incredible India” but, when I look at my home state, I see a place that simply has to deliver a better quality of life for its citizens if any of these positive images are to take hold.

Rupa Jha in Patna recording "Living India" for the BBC World Service Rupa Jha in Patna recording "Living India" for the BBC World Service

During my most recent trip, making the three-part Living India documentary for the BBC World Service, I took a year long journey in the company of four fellow Biharis. The idea was to find a small group from a mixture of backgrounds, so we could tell a global audience what it is like to live in India today as an ordinary person, trying to make your way in life.

This is not the India of our political elites, nor of the captains of industry based in our megacities. Neither is this the India that often graces the world’s media; that of natural disasters, crime or crisis. This is day-to-day India, a place that most people outside India have no image of.

I started my journey in February of 2014 – one early morning in the backstreets of the city, close to Patna Junction station. I was meeting Sunil, a shy 18 year-old Dalit boy from a very poor family. He told me, with that glimmer of hope in his dark sunken eyes: “education is the only thing I have to fight my poverty". I met him at the Super 30 coaching institute where he was being coached free of charge to appear for his engineering exams. I soon came to realise that his whole extended family and many other people back in his village were depending on his success. “Yes” he told me “this puts pressure on me”, but he sees it as his lot in life, his role and responsibility to the family.

I am very well aware of what it means to be a Dalit even today. But I was really impressed, as Sunil’s story unfolded. It was touching to see how important self-improvement was to him and what he would put up with to achieve his goals.

When I travelled to his village to meet his family he was already being treated like a celebrity. His family hinged their hope on him to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty. For a Dalit, education can be the only route out of poverty. I remember asking Sunil how he managed to travel for fifty long hours in an unreserved train compartment to reach Calicut to take admission into the engineering college. He just shrugged it off by saying: “it doesn't bother us, we are used to discomforts in life”.

I saw a steely resolve in him and it paid off because he got a seat in a prestigious engineering college. It was heart-warming to meet him later on his college campus – he had started to speak a little English and had gained an enormous amount of confidence.

My next focus was on Atul and Jaishree – a young doctor couple. What interested me about them was that, unlike me, they had left lucrative jobs elsewhere to come back to Patna and start their own small clinic, with the aim of bringing good medical facilities to the poor and the lower middle class.

They decided to shift their base to Bihar because, despite all problems, they believe this is the place to build hope. They set up their first clinic in Hajipur, on the other side of the Ganga from Patna. It is extremely busy, with a constant flow of patients from the surrounding area.

Their plan is to build a general hospital for villagers, but they seem to have got tangled up in endless amounts of red tape and bureaucracy that has left Atul “more exhausted than experienced”. They live a more comfortable middle-class existence, although their apartment block is still crumbling on the outside and prone to flooding. Bihar certainly looks a changed place for people like them with better resources, but Atul made the point that “he may be wearing a branded shirt but it seems to have more dirt on the collar now than it did before”.

As I drove around with them, I could see that there had been very little improvement in the condition of the roads around the city. They could afford a comfortable car, but that only seemed to mean that it smoothed out the pot holes, which Atul felt were actually getting worse over time. Together we struggled across the Ganga Bridge every morning and evening – a bridge that has been under constant repair for as long as I can remember. Every minute they spent clogged up in traffic was less time available for tending to patients or spending time with family.

I was left with a sense of wonderment that they continue to put up with the daily difficulties. How many people outside India would understand the extreme difficulties of commuting to work every day over that decrepit Bridge. I remember, as a child, going to see the “longest bridge in Asia” as tourists. It was a monument of pride for us, but now it’s a source of embarrassment – a symbol of the sorry state of infrastructure in Bihar.

The final piece of my human puzzle was Anita – a Dalit woman in her mid-late thirties with four children. She lives in one of the villages north of Muzzafurpur, where almost all the men are absent, working elsewhere. She is typical of many Bihari village women who have to do absolutely everything for the family, on their own.

Through Anita I recognised one change that I feel very proud of – the role of women in rural India. While the men migrate to earn a livelihood, the women who are left to take care of their children, their fields and their homes by themselves actually emerge more empowered; as somebody who runs the family and takes all the important decisions. Anita’s bold decision is to invest almost half of the entire family income in her eldest son’s attempts to pass his exams and move on to college. Unfortunately, she faced a set-back in the year when he failed his exams but, undaunted, she is putting him through his exams again and now she wants her two daughters to be educated as well.

By the end of my experience I had to acknowledge that my birthplace is slowly changing – especially in its attitude towards the Dalits. I see poor women feeling empowered and I see young Sunil gently attacking his poverty with the sword of education. I saw how, despite all odds, members of the middle class, like my two doctors, are prepared to take the lead and to take risks.

I salute the entrepreneurial spirit of my fellow Biharies. Never say never – the indomitable spirit of Bihar is what keeps the state ticking. Living in Bihar is “India living” on the edge. I wonder which way it will go from here.

Rupa Jha presents the three-part series >The Documentary: Living India, which begins on the BBC World Service on Tuesday 10 March at 22:00-22:30 IST.