Bihar wants to open 17,000 secondary schools in the next eight years, to add to the 3,000 schools that already exist.

Education experts say schools for the older age group are needed across the country because of the demand created by children who entered school as part of SSA. This programme has, since 2004, relied on a cess on every tax-paying Indian to fund elementary schools.

It has helped reduce the number of out-of-school children from 58.02 million in 2001 to 13.4 million in 2005.

"It is a function of success of SSA at least in terms of numbers," said Samphe D. Lhalungpa, chief of education for the United Nations Children's Fund, or Unicef, in India, which has worked with the government to bring innovations in teaching in schools in poor districts of Bihar, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.

"There is pressure from Class VIII onwards from children who are getting out or are already out of the SSA".

Realizing this demand, finance minister P. Chidambaram increased the education cess by 1% in the Budget for this fiscal year, and doubled the outlay for secondary education from Rs1,837 crore in 2006-07 to Rs3,794 in 2007-08. It is not clear how the Union government will share these resources with the states as no formal scheme for achieving universal secondary education has been announced by the former.

The Centre has so far funded 75% of SSA. But this fiscal onwards, it has asked states to fund an equal share in the SSA. Bihar has a budget of Rs3,300 crore for SSA in the current fiscal, one of the largest budgets of all states. The state has released Rs600 crore as the first tranche of funds.