Bihar’s much-hyped “bicycle revolution” in girls’ education and empowerment is going to be celebrated in a song being planned by the state’s education department that believes the song will add a further cultural impetus to a social change supposedly happening through two wheels.
The bicycle song, currently in the process of being tuned by Bihar-based composers Anu and Sitaram Singh, will be launched on the occasion of the state’s Education Day celebrations on November 11, the birth anniversary of India’s first education minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.
“CDs of the song will be distributed among Bihar’s schools and also at public places so that the people would feel the renaissance taking place in women’s education in Bihar,” said state education department principal secretary Anjani Kumar Singh to this newspaper on Sunday.
Scenes of lakhs of schoolgirls across Bihar riding bicycles given to them free by the Nitish Kumar-led government have been described as signs of marching progress in women’s education and empowerment in the backward, feudal state. Since Mr Kumar launched the “Mukhya Mantri Balika Bicycle Yojana” (CM’s Girls Bicycles Scheme) in 2007, some 25 lakh schoolgirls have got free bicycles so far.
In 2010, 5.5 lakh schoolgirls got the bicycles and this year, Singh said, the number is to touch 7.5 lakh. “This particular scheme, along with the scheme called Hunar for vocational education for girls and the Akshar Aanchal Yojana for women’s literacy have contributed to women’s growing education and empowerment in Bihar,” he added.
“The bicycle song, for which we are yet to finalise from two shortlisted lyrics, will be basically a motivational song that would inspire more and more girls to take up education and nurture an ambition for self-development in life,” said Singh, who has been a highly admired guardian in the changes taking place in Bihar’s education sector.
With 40 lakh women claimed to have become literate in 2011, Bihar scored a 20 per cent growth in women’s literacy, a record in the country that brought the state an award from President Pratibha Devisingh Patil.