Biometric attendance for teachers, students

Not just students, even teachers who bunk classes at municipal schools are going to be penalised.

The North Delhi Municipal Corporation has decided to install biometric attendance system in its schools. The trial run of the new system will begin at Haiderpur primary school from November 1.

The new attendance system will be used to record the presence of both students and teachers. It is also expected to find out dropout rates and help regularise mid-day meals by presenting the correct number of students attending classes.

At the trial run, the students and teachers will be given an identity card that will have a chip containing a unique pin code. Their finger prints will be recorded in a punching machine. The teachers and students will be able to register their attendance using either the card or their fingerprints. On days the machine does not work, they can mark attendance using the pin code.

The process of swiping and punching cards may turn out to be a tad too cumbersome for children as young as six and seven who study in class 1 and class II. Rekha Gupta, chairperson of the education committee, says such children will have to depend on teachers to mark their attendance.

At present, attendance records are maintained manually. It had been alleged last year that due to a lack of stringent attendance facilities, more mid-day meals were being ordered than required.

Students will be marked in the morning while teachers will be marked both in the morning and evening to ensure they have conducted all the classes."This will be the first such experiment in the city where schools will be managed through the biometric system. It will help improve in education delivery," said Rekha Gupta.

North Corporation has 780 schools in which four lakh students are registered and 9,000 teachers are employed.In Delhi, the three municipal corporations manage 1,600 schools that have 9.8 lakh students.

The other two corporations - East and South - will also install biometric attendance. The other municipal departments have already switched on to biometric attendance."If the trial run is successful, we will call for tenders for installing machines at all schools," added Gupta.