Students of the state would get the gift of community colleges on the birth anniversary of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan this year.
Chief minister Nitish Kumar would formally announce the start of the new academic session of the community colleges on September 5, the birthday of the second President of India, Radhakrishnan, which is celebrated as Teachers’ Day.
The state government has decided to open 15 colleges, which would offer job-orientated courses, as part of the Union government’s plan to open 200 such institutions across the country.
Special secretary, education, Sanjeevan Sinha, said: “The chief minister would make a formal announcement. The academic sessions of these colleges would start with it.”
Three Patna institutions — Patna Women’s College (retail management and healthcare), JD Women’s College (information technology and fashion technology) and AN College (food processing and retail management) — have been selected to offer the courses of community colleges .
Though different institutions are offering the courses, they would all be affiliated to Aryabhatta Knowledge University.
Twenty students would be taken into each batch of the courses.
The launch function would be hosted at SK Memorial Hall. Nitish would also launch BEd training programmes for untrained teachers working in government schools. State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) got a nod from National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) to train primary school teachers.
SCERT director Hassan Waris said: “The council has prepared the syllabus and the brochure for the teachers’ training programme. We would train around 40,000 school teachers through a correspondence course.”
Sources said the government wanted to create a pool of trained teachers, as the lack of qualified educators was the biggest impediment in the education sector of the state despite creating infrastructure.
Bihar has around 3.42 lakh teachers of whom around 50,000 are untrained. Around 90 per cent of them would be trained through the new programmes.
