Nitish Kumar met Governor Phagu Chauhan on Tuesday and submitted his resignation as chief minister of the NDA government in Bihar. He said the decision to sever ties with the NDA was taken by his party, the JD(U).

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The 71-year-old is a senior politician of Bihar who has been serving the state for 20 years. He has been the Chief Minister of the state since 2000. In the 2020 assembly
elections, the NDA alliance of JDU and BJP won 125 seats compared to
Mahagathbandhan’s 110 seats and formed the Bihar government. Nitish Kumar, for
the seventh time, took oath as the Chief Minister of the state.

Nitish Kumar was born in a small village in Bihar on 1st March 1951. His father Kaviraj Ram
Lakhan Singh was a freedom fighter and was close to Anuragh Narayan Sinha, one
of the founders of modern Bihar. His father left Congress and
joined Janata Party in 1957.

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The Bihar
CM studied Electrical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology in
Patna and holds a degree in the subject. After completing his studies, he had
joined Bihar’s State Electricity Department but switched to politics. He had
also participated in Jayaprakash Narayan’s movement between 1974 and 1977. He
was mentored by Jayprakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia, S N Sinha, Karpuri
Thakur, V P Singh.

Kumar
fought his first election to the Bihar state assembly from Harnaut in 1985 and
won from the seat. In the initial years, he supported Lalu Prasad Yadav as
leader of the opposition in Bihar Assembly in the year 1989 but Kumar later
switched his loyalty to BJP in 1996, after winning his first Lok Sabha seat
from Barh.

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He became a
popular politician at the national level when he was given the portfolio of the
Ministry of Railways in the United Front government in 1996 and was
subsequently made the leader of Lok Sabha. His outreach was witnessed in
western Uttar Pradesh when his followers organised an impressive rally at the
behest of a newly floated organisation called Dalit Panthers.

From 2001
to 2004, he served as a Union Cabinet Minister for Indian railways in the NDA
government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The infamous train burning incident of
Godhra happened during his tenure, which was followed by the 2002 Gujarat
riots.

Nitish
Kumar is also regarded as an architect of the bicycle and meal programmes for
school going children in government-sponsored schools. The move saw a huge
number of girls joining the school in Bihar and witnessed a low drop out of
school girls. He created several bridges, roads and is well known for curbing
crime in Bihar. He has appointed more than 1 lakh school teachers during his
tenure as a Chief Minister of Bihar.

Nitish is married to a teacher Manju Kumar Sinha, who died at the age of 53. The couple have a son Nishant Kumar, who is a graduate of BIT, Mesra.