Bengaluru: While parents have been growing increasingly anxious about the safety of their children in city schools with paedophiles among their staff stalking even toddlers in some institutions in recent years, one parent, a former techie, has come up with an innovation to tackle the situation.
Ms Tanuka Dutta has developed an app called "Staff You Trust" to help schools verify the background of a person from a database before recruiting him or her.
"Presently, the background check done by schools before hiring staff is limited to police verification from local and nearby stations. But what we need is a system to check an individual's track record and emotional temperament. And that's what we are trying to do with this app," Ms Dutta explains.
Her work has not gone in vain as many as 30 schools from the city have voluntarily signed up for the app, providing all the administrator references and digitised staff data needed for it. "The records will be kept confidential and away from non subscribers," assures Ms Dutta, revealing that an Aadhaar link is optional for users.
She began to think of developing the app in 2014 after a student was sexually assaulted in a city school, she explains. "Since then I have been thinking of developing this app and now it has finally taken form," she exults.
Ms Dutta is hoping that more schools will come forward to take to the app once it proves its mettle and helps institutions recruit only the best staff for their students.
With the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) insisting on psychometric analysis of school employees, she believes the app could help institutions take appropriate decisions when recruiting their staff.
