Govt schools to get biometric attendance system

New Delhi After missing the deadline once, North Municipal Corporation claimed that all schools in its jurisdiction will implement biometric system for attendance by April. Officials said the trial project in two of its schools has been a success and the tender process will begin soon.

The biometric system will record attendance of teachers and students. The process will help the government monitor dropout rates, and keep a tab on excess funds under various schemes. “It will also help us keep track of irregular students and monitor teachers’ regularity,” an official said.

The trial runs were conducted in two schools — one in Haiderpur and the other in Rohini Sector-15.

In the trial, teachers and students were given identity cards with unique pin codes. The facility of scanning identity cards to mark attendance was extended to students. “The process of swiping and punching cards may turn out to be too cumbersome for children. We believe that it will be hard for the students to use fingerprint-based biometric system, so we went for scanning identity cards, which will also serve the purpose of making a database of these children and their absenteeism,” North Corporation Education Committee chairman Rekha Gupta said.

Gupta said the trial runs are complete and tenders will be floated soon. “We are serving free mid-day meals to many students who are absent from schools. There is no reason why we should keep bearing the financial burden when the benefits do not reach students. There have been times when we were asked to recruit more teachers in a particular school due to high number of students, but the number of students was later found to be lower. We do not want to spend money on recruiting more teachers than needed,” Gupta said.

At present, attendance records in government schools are maintained manually. The erstwhile Municipal Corporation of Delhi faced allegations of hiring more teachers than necessary. North Municipal Corporation has 780 schools, with four lakh registered students and 9,000 teachers.  ExpressIndia