Ranchi, July 22: Students, say cheese in class. If you play truant, you will be caught on camera — or to be more precise, you will be caught missing from the frame.

In an innovative move that hopes to keep Jharkhand’s children in schools and bring down the 15.1 per cent dropout rate — almost double the national average of 8.02 per cent — the state human resource development (HRD) department is in the process of directing officials to go daily to state-run primary and middle schools and click pictures of students.

Photographic records of each day will be kept at the respective schools and block development offices of each district, eliminating anomalies in attendance registers.

To be launched in two month’s time, the well-meaning scheme will cause a spurt in the sale of digital cameras — to be sponsored by the Centre — and turn many officials into amateur photographers.

But its aim is to identify each child’s presence or absence in school across 24 districts. Fudging in attendance records and headcount will be history, if Operation Camera is implemented efficiently across the 40,155 state-run primary and middle schools (Classes 1 to VIII). The 1,151 high schools (Classes IX-XII) will be kept out of the loop — or lens.

District education officers (DEOs) and district superintendents of education (DSEs) of all 24 districts have been asked to start this process with help of block resource and cluster resource persons, who will take the pictures.

Soft copies of the photographs — read: digital version — will be archived at the BDO’s offices which have computers. In the hinterland, where many schools don’t even have proper classrooms, forget computers, a print of the photograph will be given everyday.

“This will be an efficient system to monitor school attendance and keep a tab on dropouts. It will identify every child by face,” said state primary education director D.K.Saxena. “The mechanism of archiving photographs of students of every school, everyday, will make attendance records transparent,” he said.

This mechanism will also help distinguish the absentees from the dropouts. Any student who does not turn up for three days in a row till one month is categorised as an absentee. But if she or he doesn’t attend school for a month or more, the student is a dropout.

This will help keep official statistics to evaluate education schemes. Officer on special duty, HRD, P.K. Jha said apart from pictures, schools would record home addresses of students to trace them if they pull out of classes.