Facial recognition attendance system faces technical glitch on first day in Telangana schools

The new facial recognition attendance system (FRS), introduced for Telangana teachers on August 1, faced server issues and GPS errors, causing delays in marking attendance. The system aims to prevent proxy attendance and improve monitoring in real time.

Hyderabad: The facial recognition-based attendance system, introduced for the teachers for the first time on Friday, faced a major technical and server issue, causing attendance delays across the government and local body schools across the State.

Starting August 1, the School Education department made the facial recognition system (FRS) mandatory for teachers to mark their daily attendance.

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With nearly 1 lakh teachers attempting to register and mark their attendance simultaneously, the server failed to handle the sudden load, resulting in application crash.

Several teachers reported receiving repeated alerts such as server busy and internet slow. As a result, both teachers and students’ attendance could not be processed for several hours.

In addition to server issues, there were GPS errors within the app. The GPS falsely indicated that teachers were not at their designated school despite being in their own school. Several teachers spent hours to resolve the technical issue but it went in vain.

“As large number of teachers tried to register and mark attendance, there was a technical issue till afternoon. Both teachers and students’ attendance got affected due to server issues, which were restored post noon,” a headmaster said.

Doing away with age-old practice of marking attendance in registers, the department launched FRS to record teachers’ attendance in the government-run schools under its ambit. So far, the FRS was being used to mark students’ attendance.

Prior to taking students’ attendance via photographs, the teacher concerned must take a selfie photograph via the FRS application installed on the smartphone or tablet device. The application comes loaded with details of the teaching and non-teaching staff of the school. Facial details in the photograph automatically synchronize with the details saved in the application, and attendance is marked against the individual.

The new attendance system will ensure teachers arrive at schools on time and help curb proxy attendance. It will help monitor the teachers’ attendance in real time as it is set to be linked to ‘Vidya Samiksha Kendra’, a command control centre, established on the lines of Telangana Integrated Command and Control Centre.

Meanwhile, the School Education department said while there are a total of 1,28,760 staff, 96,327 (74.81 percent) registered on the FRS application and 89,922 (93.35 percent) recorded their attendance.