Fadnavis launches school named after Vajpayee

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Tuesday launched the Bharat Ratna Atal Bihari Vajpayee International Schools here on the occasion of 94th birth anniversary of the late prime minister.

The school is affiliated to the Maharashtra International Education Board (MIEB), which the state government had set up with an aim to achieve higher education standards.

Initially, 13 zilla parishad (ZP) schools would be part of this international board and the curriculum will be in the mother tongue, the Chief Minister's Office (CMO) said quoting Fadnavis on its official twitter handle.

Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar, Maharashtra ministers Vinod Tawde, Pankaja Munde, Sadabhau Khot and computer scientist Dr Vijay Bhatkar were also present at the launch event.

Vajpayee died in Delhi on August 16 this year after a prolonged illness.

"Atalji worked hard to increase our growth rate in all sectors, especially education. He always insisted on education of international standards in rural India. We, in Maharashtra, by targeted efforts and initiatives have now jumped up to the 3rd rank from 13th," the CMO quoted Fadnavis as saying.

Fadnavis also said that his government improvised in the education sector with the same machinery, same teachers, in the same infrastructure, but "with innovative solutions".

He claimed the government was seeing reverse migration with many students from English medium schools returning to government-run ZP schools.

The international board will boost this trend, the chief minister added.

"This is not a copy-paste curriculum but drafted by team of experts like Dr Vijay Bhatkar, Dr Kakodkar, Swaroop Sampat, Achyut Palav and many others. We are intervening just for capacity building, framing strategies and for providing whatever assistance is needed," he said, referring to the board's curriculum.