Bhubaneswar, April 22: The Orissa Primary Education Project Authority has made the ardous task of spotting students missing from government schools for long easy.

The authority has come out with a comprehensive database of all children between newborn and 14 years of age in Orissa complete with details — name, age, education and their family’s financial status.

The mammoth task, which went on for three years, was completed recently.

Project “e-shishu”, yesterday bagged the prestigious Prime Minister Award for Excellence in Public Administration award for the best e-governance practice for the year 2006-07. Manmohan Singh presented the award on occasion of the Civil Service Day yesterday to the institute’s Orissa director, Deoranjan Kumar Singh.

Project e-Shishu has been designed to meet the goals of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and would track 10.8-million children between newborn and 14 years and map around 70,000 schools and identify 1.48lakh teachers.

The project was completed through a door-to-door survey of nearly 75lakh families. As many as 52,000 enumerators collected information from every village in 30 districts of Orissa. e-Shishu also involves a “child tracking system” wherein each child’s name and guardian’s name is registered. District programmers would from now on update information about the child, school and important details at the district office while the data would be consolidated at the centralised server in the state office.

Every household and child would have a number through which they would be tracked, regularly. This, authorities hope, would help control the trafficking problem.

“We hope our ideas resonate with the officials,” said Prabhat Mishra, the director of the management information system.