Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar to farmers: Stop stubble burning

MOTIHARI: Chief minister Nitish Kumar on Sunday asked the officials concerned to stop stubble burning in the state.
“Like Punjab and Haryana, farmers in Bihar have also started burning stubble in the fields, which will not only harm them and environment, but also create a horrible situation in future. Earlier, it was confined to Rohtas and Kaimur, but the farmers of Patna and Nalanda districts have also started stubble burning, which must be stopped at all costs,” the CM said after inspecting the contract potato farming model by women self-help groups at Sonbarsa in East Champaran.
The CM asked Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project CEO Balamurugan D to take Jeevika didis’ help in creating awareness against stubble burning.
Speaking at Mahavir-Rameshwar Inter College in Harsiddhi, the CM said the state government had already decided to open an engineering college in each district and paramedical colleges and polytechnic colleges in each sub-divisional headquarters for imparting technical education to the deprived sections of society.
He said the government under him opened 22,000 new schools in remote villages but 12.5% children were still out of the education system and most of them belonged to the unprivileged sections.
He recounted how his government schemes like poshak and cycle yojana, student credit card and scholarship initiatives minimized the dropout rate of girls students in schools.
Earlier, the CM unveiled two busts of late Rameshwar Mahto and Mahavir Prasad on the Mahavir-Rameshwar Inter College in Harsiddhi. While Rameshwar was the father of former minister Awadhesh Prasad Kushwaha, Mahavir was the father of district BJP chief Rajendra Prasad Gupta. Nitish also inaugurated the first digital panchayat of the district and a panchayat bhawan in Sonbarsa.
Ministers Pramod Kumar, Rana Randhir Singh and Vinod Narayan Jha were also present on the occasion.