A garland placed on a stone memorial, then a walk through rooms where students now conduct chemistry experiments and program robots — Bihar Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary turned a district school visit into a statement about what state-funded modernisation looks like on the ground. On Thursday, 13 November 2026, he travelled to Manjhi in Saran district to pay tribute at the Swargiya Dalan Singh Higher Secondary School and inspect its newly developed laboratories.

Choudhary first garlanded the statue of Swargiya Dalan Singh — the late individual in whose memory the school stands — offering his respects before moving on to the facility review. He wrote on X: 'स्व० दलन सिंह जी की प्रतिमा पर माल्यार्पण कर श्रद्धांजलि अर्पित की' ('I offered floral tribute at the statue of the late Dalan Singh ji'), framing the visit as both a moment of remembrance and a ground-level inspection.

Four new labs under the Kayakalp Abhiyan

The centrepiece of the visit was the inspection of four laboratories developed under the state government's Kayakalp Abhiyan — a school infrastructure upgrade campaign. The new facilities include a Chemistry lab, a Biology lab, an ISM (Indian System of Medicine) lab, and, notably, an Astronomy-cum-Robotics lab. That last combination — stargazing and coding under the same roof at a district school — signals an ambition that goes well beyond the basics.

The Kayakalp Abhiyan has focused on upgrading physical and scientific infrastructure at government schools across Bihar. Chief ministerial visits to district campuses like this one serve a dual purpose: they honour local legacy figures, and they put a spotlight on scheme delivery at the block level, where implementation often determines whether a campaign succeeds or quietly stalls.

Saran district's signal moment

Saran, one of Bihar's more densely populated districts, has historically lagged on educational infrastructure relative to urban centres. A functioning Astronomy-cum-Robotics lab at a block-level school in Manjhi is precisely the kind of concrete deliverable that STEM-access advocates have argued should become the norm, not the exception, in rural Bihar.

The students who now have access to these labs — particularly the robotics and astronomy facility — stand to gain exposure to disciplines that rarely reach government schools in smaller towns. Whether the Kayakalp Abhiyan scales this model across more of Bihar's roughly 75,000-plus government schools is the question that will define the campaign's real legacy.