HARD LESSONS

Bihar isn’t much known for an abundance of education infrastructure—an endemic scarcity is more like it. Even so, preliminary findings from an official scrutiny of 80,000 state government schools have come as a shocker.

- Amitabh Srivastava

Especially the fact that Rs 1,400 crore school funds have been sitting unutilised. Principals have the mandate to take up development work of up to Rs 5 lakh for their schools. But what the survey ran into was systemic inertia: minutiae like missing bulbs, dingy toilets and unused lab equipment adding up to a sorry big picture. Sorrier for the fact that, under Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, education usually gets top billing—in this year’s Rs 2.62 lakh crore budget, it was endowed with the highest outlay of Rs 40,450 crore.

In the backdrop, there’s a story of conflict. Since 2022, the education portfolio has been held by Madhepura MLA Chandra Shekhar of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), who made his mark by stirring up a storm with remarks on the