Patna: Attendance by teaching and non-teaching employees of Patna University has gone up thanks to installation of biometric attendance machine.
Patna University installed the machines at its colleges, post-graduate departments and administrative block of colleges on the directions of governor-cum-chancellor of universities, Satya Pal Malik. The chancellor's office decided to install the machines in December. Malik, while holding higher education review meeting, had asked different universities to install the machines by July-end.
Teaching and non-teaching employees now register biometric attendance twice a day. The university introduced the system with both facial recognition and thumb impression features. Students are happy with the machine as they find teachers being more regular and punctual.
"With the introduction of biometric attendance, teachers have become more regular in taking classes," said Ankit Raj, a second-year undergraduate student.
"Most teachers enter class at 10.30 am now. Earlier, teachers were not regular in class. Hardly a teacher would take classes on time as their attendance was noted in a register and there was no mechanism to physically verify attendance."
Installation of biometric attendance machine helped regularise attendance of non-teaching staff at the university too.
Not just students, even teachers claim that biometric machines help check attendance.
"The teachers have to register their attendance twice a day, first in the morning when they reach college around 10am and second when they leave the institutions at 4.30pm," said Atul Aditya Pandey, a teacher at Patna Science College.
"Earlier, many teachers, left the college once classes got over around 2.30pm. But now they have to wait till 4.30pm."
The teacher said the extra time teachers get after class has to be devoted to research and extra-curricular activities.
The attendance is stored in the machine and will be checked by university, Raj Bhavan and the education department at regular intervals.
The proposal to install biometric attendance machine is almost two years old. The chancellor's office has on several occasions asked varsities to install it but despite repeated instructions from the chancellor's office, it was not installed at the varsity.
