Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar on Thursday said his government would provide all necessary support for ensuring proper infrastructure and adequate number of teachers in the higher secondary schools set up in all the panchayats of the state.

While reviewing the education department and going through the detailed presentation of additional chief secretary Sanjay Kumar, which threw light on the present status as well as the achievements and challenges, the CM said that efforts should be expedited to meet the requirement of teachers and infrastructure in a phased manner so that the students could avail higher education within panchayat itself.

Education minister Vijay Kumar Choudhary said a road map has already been developed for it to complete the exercise in two-three years at a maximum.

In 2013, the Bihar government had taken a decision in 2013 to open a higher secondary school in every panchayat.

The state has 8,387 panchayats, while the government has started 6,421 higher secondary schools in panchayats which had none by setting up new ones or upgrading existing middle schools. The total number of higher secondary schools now in the state is 9360, though adequate infrastructure and teachers’ strength is still lacking in many of them.

The CM said the fact that the number of girls taking the matriculation exams exceeded the boys was a testimony to the government’s consistent emphasis on female education through a slew of initiatives. “Apart from empowerment of girls through education, it also leads to fall in fertility rate. According to a report, it is directly linked to girls’ education and Bihar has seen the drop in fertility rate from 4.3 in 2005-06 to 3.0 with improved access to girls’ education, which was virtually non-existent a decade and half ago,” he said.

Later, the education minister said that the government was determined to complete the recruitment of primary teachers for the sixth phase despite yet another disruption caused by the third wave of Covid-19 pandemic so that it could immediately go for the seventh phase recruitment for secondary and higher secondary schools.

In his presentation, the ACS said that Bihar had almost achieved the desired teacher-pupil ratio of 1:40 as stipulated under the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA).

Non-academic work

The state project director of Samagra Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA), Shrikant Shastri, on Thursday circulated the google forms to be filled by school heads and teachers by February 15 as part of the national survey to identify the quantum of time teachers spent in teaching and non-teaching work. “Under the new education policy (NEP), teachers are considered the only source to bring about improvement in education and they will not be permitted to be engaged in non-academic work under the NEP,” he wrote to all the district education officers and district programme officers. It has been an old demand of teachers to relieve them with non-academic work and the courts also ruled in its favour in the past.