Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik urges ministers, High Court judges to adopt schools

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Bhubaneswar: Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik Monday urged Orissa High Court judges, two Union ministers from the state and all ministers, MLAs and MPs of Odisha to adopt government schools under the ‘Mo School’ initiative.

In a letter to the elected representatives and judges, Patnaik advised them to adopt the schools in which they had studied or any school of their choice.

A person can adopt a maximum of three schools under the initiative, he said.

The move came after a number of bureaucrats, including Chief Secretary SC Mohapatra, came forward to adopt schools for their holistic development this year.

“All of us have an emotional link with the school in which we have studied and so it should be our moral responsibility to ensure that the schools develop and achieve their highest potential,” he said.

The chief minister had launched the Mo School campaign on Childrens Day, 2017 to bring together the alumni and the community for revamping government and government- aided schools.

The fund for the programme comes from donors and a corpus of Rs 100 crore has been created by the state government.

An official said, about 25,000 schools in the state have so far come under the initiative.

The government has approved projects worth Rs 57.49 crore for 8,877 schools during 2020-21 fiscal. Of this Rs 19.16 crore was contributed by alumni of different schools, while Rs 38.32 crore was provided by the government from the corpus.

While Chief Secretary S C Mohapatra has committed to adopt D N High School in Keonjhar, chief advisor to the Chief Minister R Balakrishnan and principal advisor to the CM Asit Tripathy, who is also the chief of Western Odisha Development Council, will adopt Jajpur Government High School and Titlagarh High School respectively, the official said.

Works Secretary Krishan Kumar and Roopa Roshan Sahoo, additional secretary to the chief minister, will adopt three schools under this initiative.

School and Mass Education Secretary Satyabrata Sahu, will adopt Manikeswari High School in Bhawanipatna.