Patna,(BiharTimes): When the education department is unable to pay salary on time to thousands of para-teachers––not to speak of regularizing their jobs––and they are being brutally lathicharged on the streets of Patna, it is spending crores on organizing three-day Bihar Diwas celebration.

Incidentally, such lavish expenditure was made within a week of a big Adhikar Rally organized in New Delhi to demand special category status for Bihar. According to the chief minister Nitish Kumar Bihar, in spite of development, is backward in almost all developmental index and needs generous central help and special category status.

But the big question is where is the need for celebrating Bihar Diwas in such a grand scale every year. After all how can separation of Bihar from Bengal, more than a century ago, be celebrated in a scale much larger than the independence of the country.

Were all those who had been ruling Bihar for the last so many years less Bihari because they never spent huge amount of money in organizing such a show every year?

When the state government is unable to appoint full-fledged engineers, doctors, teachers etc and pay their salary on time––almost all of them have been recruited on contract basis––from where has the money come to spend on such an extravaganza? Who is paying such huge amount of money to Bollywood personalities and for what? Why is the local talent not being promoted on such occasions?

These are some of the questions doing the rounds all over the state and even in Gandhi Maidan itself, where the main function was organized.

In January last the doctors went on strike, in February-March the engineers ceased to work for more than a month. They have only postponed their agitation.

The para-teachers are on the warpath for last so many months. They even disrupted Nitish Kumar’s programme on the occasion on Friday. Their argument was just one: if the education department can not afford to pay teachers’ salary how come crores of rupees are being spent on this celebration.

As reported widely in the media there is no money to buy cotton, soaps and cotton gauge in Patna Medical College and Hospital in the month of March as all the funds have been exhausted in just paying the salaries in the last 11 months. The rural health service e is merely surviving on the central government’s scheme––NRHM.

A political observer who wished not to be quoted told BiharTimes that perhaps in no state of the country such a brilliant mechanism has been developed to indulge in the March loot as in Bihar.

First the entire JD(U) machinery remained involved in the Adhikar Rally skipping the state legislature when the ministers, MLAs and MLCs are supposed to do some very important works. After that virtually the entire state machinery was assigned the task of organizing Bihar Diwas function on such a mammoth scale.

“It is in monarchy that celebrations of this scale are being organized quite frequently at the cost of state exchequer. All these are done to distract the attention of the people from the real problems. With media being the main beneficiary in the form of advertisements, who is going to raise questions such celebrations,” he commented.