‘It’s our baby’: RJD upset over Bihar job ad featuring only Nitish Kumar

Though Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Prasad Yadav attended the event, RJD expected equal credit in the government ad, and caption it on the lines of an effort made by the Nitish-Tejashwi government to provide employment.

RJD spokesperson Mrityunjay Tiwari told The Indian Express: “Everyone knows that the 10-lakh jobs initiative was our idea and promise during the 2020 polls. We should have been given equal credit and a picture of the deputy CM should have been included in the government advertisement. People know that it is the Nitish-Tejashwi government and not just a Nitish Kumar government. The employment drive is our baby and it cannot be hijacked.”

Nitish handed out appointment letters to 12 teachers to symbolically mark the mega recruitment drive. In November 2023, during the first phase of the teachers’ mass recruitment, the government had appointed 1,20,336 teachers. The state government claims to have achieved a teacher-student ratio of 1:5, with 51 women teachers being among the newly appointed ones in the two phases.

Addressing the event, Nitish said: “It is a matter of great happiness that people from other states such as Delhi, Haryana, UP, Karnataka, Uttarakhand, and Jharkhand are among the newly appointed teachers….We had started the drive in 2006-07, and appointed over 3.68 lakh teachers. We are on course to give jobs to 10 lakh people or even more.”

Treading cautiously after the advertisement was put out, Tejashwi posted on X: “Sankalp wo, jo jeete hain, jo kahte hain, karte hain (We live our resolution and do what we promise).”

He said how the state government has made a sort of world record by appointing 2.17 lakh in the education department.