Gujarat Government to monitor classroom attendance of teachers, students

Ahmedabad, Gujarat: Going one step ahead ofbiometric-based attendance system, the Gujarat Education Department has decided to implement a broader system to monitor physical presence of students and teachers in state-run schools as well as colleges with the help of ‘live web streaming' of video or photographs of classrooms.

To find out the feasibility and other technicalities about integrating the bio-metric attendance machines with 'live' monitoring system, the State Education Department has called a meeting of all the interested parties on September 5 before floating a tender for the same.

"The main purpose of this whole project is to not only to monitor the attendance of teachers and students, but also to keep a check on whether they are actually present in the classroom. To find out the technical aspects of our project, we have called a meeting of all the interested vendors on September 5," said state project director of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) Mukesh Kumar.

"This unique attendance system is coupled with 'live' monotoring of classrooms. Looking at the vast scope of work, we will first run a pilot project in 1000 schools in six districts. After assessing the success of pilot project, we will decide to implement it in all the remaining government run schools as well institutes," said Kumar.

Apart from 39,000-odd schools, the state government also wishes to include 360-odd government colleges of different streams under this project, he said.

As per the public notice issued by Education Department for interested parties, there are approximately 33,000 government primary schools, 6000 secondary schools, 300 Science, Commerce and Arts colleges and 60 government Engineering and Diploma colleges in the state.