The new Android mobile application developed by the State government for taking attendance of school teachers failed to make a good beginning.
Only 3,518, out of 1,79,079 teachers in the State, were able to mark their attendance on the first day as many of them did not have Android phones or did not know how to operate it within the stipulated time.
Krishna tops State
In Anantapur district, only 86 of 8,852 teachers could mark their attendance. Krishna district stood at the top with 431 out of 5,744 teachers marking their attendance before 9 a.m. and taking three selfies within 50 meters of the school. While in Alluri Sitharamaraju district, only 8 out of 6,601 teachers marked their attendance using the new system.
On August 14 and 15, as many as 32,149 and 40,436 teachers downloaded the app on August 14 and 15 respectively.
United Teachers’ Federation Anantapur district president Cherukuri Lingamaiah said that they were not opposed to the new attendance system but the State government must provide the handsets. “At many places, there were no signals of any mobile operator. The old system of iris scanning and fingerprint was good enough, but they were not functioning properly,” he said.
Many teachers opined that the 10-minute window was too small for them to take selfies and upload as the servers get busy at the time with more than 1.5 lakh teachers trying to log in. Many had to hurriedly learn from their children on how to operate/download the app and connect.
