Telangana govt schools to adopt facial recognition system for staff attendance

The department is enforcing the new attendance system for staff working in Government and Local Body Schools, Model Schools, TGRIES, KGBVs and Urban Residential Schools functioning in Peddapalli district as a pilot project. It is likely to extend to all districts.

Hyderabad: Marking attendance in the registers will be a thing of the past for teaching and non-teaching staff in government run schools as the School Education department decided to implement the Facial Recognition System (FRS).

The department is enforcing the new attendance system for staff working in Government and Local Body Schools, Model Schools, TGRIES, KGBVs and Urban Residential Schools functioning in Peddapalli district as a pilot project. It is likely to extend to all districts.

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School Education director EV Narasimha Reddy has recently directed Peddapalli district education officer D Madhavi to take necessary action for implementing FRS in the district.

Reddy asked the DEO to instruct headmasters under her jurisdiction to cooperate with RNIT (FRAMS) team, service provider, besides allotting a nodal officer for monitoring the programme.

The new attendance system will ensure teachers reach the schools in time besides curbing proxy teachers. It will aid the department in monitoring the teachers’ attendance as well. “This new attendance system is the need of the hour to ensure teachers maintain punctuality to schools,” said a headmaster.

Earlier, the department had implemented this attendance system for teachers in Hyderabad, Rangareddy and Medchal-Malkajgiri schools on a pilot basis.

However, due to opposition from the teacher unions, the department kept teachers out of this attendance system but implemented it for all government run school students in the State.

With the State government deciding to implement FRS for Secretariat employees, the School Education department too rolled out the initiative for its employees in the head office and now to teaching and non-teaching staff of schools.

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.

The facial details captured in the photograph automatically synchronizes with the details saved in the application, and attendance is marked against the individual.

“Why should teachers use their smartphones for taking attendance via the application, which already has issues as it is not compatible with the iOS smart phones? The State government must provide tablet devices to all government run schools,” said a teacher.