Bihar Quiz: Education, Universities and Health in Bihar

It was set up on 1 October 1917 as an examining and affiliating university for the province of Bihar and Odisha, and it is the oldest university in the state as well as one of the oldest in the country.

In the Census of 2011 Rohtas, with its headquarters at Sasaram in the Shahabad region, recorded the highest literacy rate among the districts of Bihar, ahead of Patna and Munger, which came next.

The Census of 2011 recorded Bihar’s literacy rate as 61.8 per cent, the lowest among the states of India, with 71.2 per cent for men and 51.5 per cent for women.

The Indian Institute of Management of the state works at Bodh Gaya in Gaya district, the town of the Mahabodhi temple, and it was among the institutes opened in the second round of expansion of the IIM system.

The institution opened in 1925 under that name and was renamed Patna Medical College after independence; its hospital is still among the largest in eastern India and the oldest teaching hospital of the state.

The institute at Agamkuan in Patna works under the Indian Council of Medical Research and is the national centre for research on kala-azar, or visceral leishmaniasis, the disease whose heaviest Indian burden lies in the plains of north Bihar.

Under the Bal Hriday Yojana the state pays for the surgery and the care of children with congenital heart disease, screening them through the school health programme and sending them to recognised hospitals, so that a family does not have to sell land for an operation.

Magadh University, set up in 1962, has its campus at Bodh Gaya in Gaya district and affiliates a very large number of colleges across south Bihar, which is why it figures so often in state papers.

The Nalanda University Act was passed by Parliament in 2010, creating a central university at Rajgir in Nalanda district as a revival of the ancient mahavihara, with an international character and schools of Buddhist studies, historical studies, ecology and international relations.

Kala-azar, or visceral leishmaniasis, is caused by a parasite carried by the sandfly, which breeds in the damp cracks of mud walls and cattle sheds in the plains of north Bihar, so the control programme sprays the inside walls of houses, offers free diagnosis and treatment at the block level…

The board, with its office at Patna, holds the matriculation and the intermediate examinations of the state and publishes their results, and its papers are the ones that lakhs of students of Bihar sit every year.