PATNA: Chief minister (CM) Nitish Kumar on Sunday asked the education department to prepare a book on the life and contributions of the country’s first education minister Abul Kalam Azad and distribute them among the students of government schools in the state.Addressing a function organised by the education department to celebrate Shiksha Diwas that coincides with the birth anniversary of Azad, the CM said Azad should be clubbed with Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in the race for country’s great freedom fighters. “During Azad’s 10-year stint as the country’s first education minister, institutions as University Grants Commission (UGC) and IITs were established,” the CM said.“A book on Azad is a must. The education department should prepare it in a year. A book on the life of Mahatma Gandhi has already been distributed among the government school students,” the CM said, adding familiarity of schoolchildren and teachers with vignettes from the lives of two great freedom fighters would help improve their vision about the future.The CM said after the state government started observing November 11 as Shiksha Diwas in 2007, the Centre followed the suit the next year. “What we do, the Centre also picks up,” he said.Deputy CM Sushil Kumar Modi , education minister Krishna Nandan Prasad Verma and additional chief secretary of education department R K Mahajan also addressed the function.The CM awarded the state’s Shiksha Purashkar to Padma Shri recipient Manas Bihari Verma, former senior scientist at DRDO and assistant of “missile man”-cum-former President Dr A P J Abdul Kalam, for his post-retirement educational activities for the deprived sections of the society.The CM talked at length about the steps taken by his government to promote girls’ education in the state, which included uniform and cycle schemes and Kanya Utthan Yojana under which Rs 10,000 will be given to every unmarried girl who has cleared intermediate and Rs 25,000 to every graduate girl.The CM said thanks to girls’ education, fertility rate (child born per woman) has come down in the state from 4.7 in 2005 to 3 at present against the national average of 2. He said the fertility rate among intermediate pass women in the state stood at 1.6 against the national average of 1.7.“The practice of child marriage is bad. It makes pregnancy unsafe and children born have either stunted physical growth or are mentally weak,” the CM said, adding it was for this reason that the government started the campaign against child marriage and dowry in the state.The deputy CM said as Azad had been an institution builder, several new institutes were established in the state on the initiative of CM Nitish, such as Chandragupta Institute of Management, Chanakya National Law University, extension centre of BIT Mesra and Aryabhatt Knowledge University.

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