A state in southern India is facing severe backlash from child rights activists and experts after the authorities proposed to introduce an AI face recognition system to keep track of students’ attendance.
The Department of School Education and Literacy in Karnataka is planning to use mobile phone-based facial recognition to mark attendance in the Students Achievement Tracking System (SATS) – the government’s database for monitoring students.
The facial recognition system will also be used to track beneficiaries of government welfare schemes such as midday meals, where pupils are provided lunches under the largest free-food-in-school programme in the world, the authorities earlier said.
The state government said it developed a separate mobile application, with the attendance system set to be implemented in the 2025–2026 academic year. According to The Hindu, all student information has already been added to the Students Achievement Tracking System.
The system can recognise students’ faces in real time using facial recognition technology. Once the image is captured through the mobile application, it will be encrypted and converted into a unique identification code, which cannot be reverse-engineered. Officials said this would ensure privacy and data security.
A coalition of educationists, teachers’ unions, parents’ groups, and civil society organisations has warned the Karnataka government that the facial recognition system could expose children to severe risks of data misuse, exploitation, and abuse.
The coalition of 31 experts and organisations wrote to chief minister Siddaramaiah on Monday, urging the government to roll back the initiative. “Schools are supposed to be protected spaces,” the letter read.
The signatories warned that facial data of children, if leaked or stolen, could have “unimaginable consequences, including falling into the hands of child traffickers and criminals”.
The coalition also expressed concerns over possible sexual exploitation, given the rise in deepfake tools.
“By introducing surveillance through facial recognition, we are creating vulnerabilities for children instead of protecting them. Schools must remain safe spaces, not zones of surveillance,” Niranjanaradhya VP, the convener of the People’s Alliance for Fundamental Right to Education, was quoted by The Indian Express as saying.
He said that the government already mandates School Development and Monitoring Committees in every school. “If these are strengthened and supported, they can ensure far greater accountability than any surveillance tool ever could,” Mr Niranjanaradhya added.
The state government said a total of 52,686 schools would be covered under this facial recognition programme, including 46,460 government and 6,226 aided ones. The application is equipped to monitor the attendance of more than 525,500 pupils, it said.
Last year, Farida Shaheed, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, called for a ban on the use of facial recognition technologies in educational institutions.
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