After facing severe flak over the Muzaffarpur shelter home sex scandal, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has launched an ambitious scheme that promises to provide a monetary assistance that will cover a girl child’s life from her birth to graduation.

Each girl can get up to Rs 54,100 under different components of the Mukhyamantri Kanya Utthan Yojana. Over 3.12 lakh girls will be covered in the current fiscal.

Launching the scheme last week, Nitish Kumar said he was happy to start the scheme, but added that he was “standing here with mixed feelings” over the case of sex abuse at a state-funded girls’ shelter home in Muzaffarpur.

Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Yadav had lashed out at Kumar over the rape of 34 girls in the shelter home.

Yadav wrote an open letter addressed to Kumar, who is also the president of the ruling Janata Dal (United), blaming him and his government for the incident. He also accused the government of trying to cover up the matter.

In his letter, Yadav, the former deputy chief minister of Bihar, wrote that his letter was non-political. He called the incident the “most horrifying Institutional mass rape case”.

“Before a politician, I am the brother of seven sisters, the son of a mother and uncle to many nieces,” wrote Yadav, underlining his concern for the girls who were raped inside the shelter home run by the Bihar government.

“The government slept while they were being raped every night,” wrote the younger son of RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, stating that the plight of the orphan girls were ignored because they are “nobody’s vote-bank”.

Commenting on the viral photos of the main accused Brijesh Thakur in which he seen laughing even as he is led away by the police, Yadav said, “Brijesh Thakur is laughing shamelessly even after his arrest because he knows that those who he served will save him to save themselves.”

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) began probing the case on Sunday.

The Muzaffarpur horror came to light when the Bihar Social Welfare Department filed an FIR based on a social audit of the shelter home conducted by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.