Patna: The cabinet on Tuesday gave consent to set up a committee to look into anomalies in the salaries of university teaching and non-teaching employees.

Cabinet secretariat's principal secretary Arun Kumar Singh said the committee will be formed under Sunil Kumar Singh, a member of the revenue board. He was speaking in a post-cabinet press briefing. "The committee has been asked to submit its report in six months. It will look into the salary anomalies of the employees of the university related to the recommendations of the seventh pay commission," Arun said.

The cabinet decision followed chief minister Nitish Kumar's announcement on Monday that the government will take steps to give teaching and non-teaching employees the benefits of the 7th pay commission recommendations.

Around 13,000 employees working in 13 universities of the state, including 7,500 teachers will be benefited by the committee's recommendations. The committee will have representatives from the education and finance departments.

Two acres at Barari in Bhagalpur will be transferred to the information technology ministry on a 30-year lease free of cost for a software technology park. Bihar at present has only one such park in Patna.

In a move to increase storage capacity for foodgrains, the cabinet approved a proposal to set up godowns with storage capacity of 200 tonnes, 500 tonnes and 1,000 tonnes. This is aimed at adding storage capacity of 8 lakh tonnes from 2018 to 2022 under the third agricultural roadmap.

The primary agricultural credit societies have been tasked with creating this storage capacity. The societies will get half of the project cost as government aid and the rest as loan. A revolving fund of Rs 560 crore has been sanctioned for this.

As part of the roadmap, the cabinet has decided to help these societies set up rice mills.

A total of 260 such mills, each at a project cost of Rs 77.45 lakh, will be set up.

The 15 decisions taken on Tuesday included the transfer of 27 acres of government land to the health department at Khaira in Jamui to set up a medical college; name the government medical college at Madhepura as Jan Nayak Karpoori Thakur Medical College; transfer Araria-Sikti road (29km) from the rural works department to the road construction department; restore services of one Pradeep Kumar of Bihar accounts services in the light of the high court's directive; and approve a special incentive scheme for field officials engaged in implementation of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Gramin) for timely completion of the dwelling units.