The department began telecasting e-content for students of classes IX and X — option 2.

The context. Schools across the country closed in March 2020 with the COVID-19 lockdown. Online teaching was of little use in Bihar, where most rural households had neither a computer nor a reliable internet connection, but a very large share had access to television. The Education Department therefore turned to Doordarshan Bihar, whose signal reaches almost every village, and began broadcasting lessons from April 2020.

Why classes IX and X first. These are the years leading to the Bihar Board matriculation examination, the single most consequential examination in a student’s school career in the state, and the cohort whose loss of teaching time would have been hardest to make up. Coverage was later extended to other classes.

The wider programme. The same approach was taken nationally through Swayam Prabha, a set of DTH channels carrying school and university content, and through DIKSHA, the digital platform for school education. Bihar’s Unnayan initiative, which had begun before the pandemic in Nalanda as a remedial-teaching effort using recorded lessons, provided much of the ready material.

Why option 3 is a plausible distractor. Doordarshan does broadcast farm programmes of the Krishi Darshan and Kisan Chaupal type, but those are agricultural extension broadcasts of long standing, not something the Education Department began in April 2020.

Hence, the answer is the telecast of e-content for class IX-X students.