TUMAKURU: Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai on Monday announced that the scheme of distributing free bicycles to high school students, which was stopped for a couple of years, will be resumed from the current academic year.
Bommai, who inaugurated the academic year 2022-23 at Empress Karnataka Public School (KPS) was replying to Amulya, a Class X student of KPS at Bellavi town, when the latter insisted that bicycles are a necessity to attend classes in time, as her house is far from school.
“It was stopped due to the pandemic, when schools were closed. Now, we will distribute bicycles with the funds allocated in the supplementary budget,” he declared. “After a long time, schools have reopened, offline classes are important for students and I welcome them back to school. We are ready to give books, uniforms and bicycles in the coming days,” Bommai said.
Replying to Bharata CS of Chikkanagalli that two classrooms were in bad shape, Bommai admitted that the situation is similar in many schools across the state, as new classrooms were not built for 8-10 years. “Now we will construct over 6,500 classrooms at an estimated cost of Rs 1,000 crore by the year-end,” he promised.