The Bihar government claimed to have created history in the country by recruiting over 1.20 lakh teachers through a single advertisement as chief minister Nitish Kumar distributed appointment letters to 25,000 of them at a function in the state capital on Thursday.

With this, the Nitish-led Grand Alliance government took a large step towards fulfilling its promise to provide 10 lakh government jobs, made soon after it came to power in August 2022.

Among the selected teachers, over 70,000 are for primary schools, while the rest are for high schools and higher secondary or plus two schools. Around 58,000 or 48 per cent of them are women.

Government officials said that 88 per cent of the selected teachers are from Bihar, while 12 per cent are from 14 states, including Kerala, Karnataka, Gujarat, Delhi, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Assam, Bengal, Punjab, Jharkhand, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.

Busloads of qualified candidates were brought to the Gandhi Maidan venue in Patna from different districts, while others joined the programme via video-conferencing from the district headquarters.

The officials said that the student-teacher ratio in Bihar has moved closer to the national average, and will surpass it after the proposed second phase of the recruitment of teachers.

Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader and deputy chief minister Tejashwi Prasad Yadav and other senior ministers were present at the function and each of them handed over appointment letters to a few students after Nitish did the honours.