About one million Urdu speakers moved to what was then East Bengal adjacent to their Bihar Province in eastern India.

Pakistan did not wish to accept the Biharis left in the newly formed Bangladesh as it saw itself a struggling to manage thousands of Afghan refugees at that time,[2] while Bangladeshis scorned the ethnic Biharis for having supported and sided with the West Pakistan during the war and preferring their native Urdu over the Bengali Language Movement.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has not addressed the plight of the Biharis.

An estimated 600,000 Biharis live in 66 camps in 13 regions across Bangladesh, and an equal number have acquired Bangladeshi citizenship.

[5] A large number of people from the Bhojpuri speaking regions of Bihar Province and Uttar Pradesh Province of British India travelled to various parts of the world in the 19th century to serve as indentured labours on sugarcane, cocoa, rice, and rubber plantations in the Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius, Myanmar, Seychelles and Natal, South Africa.