A student of DAV Kapildev in Ranchi punches her ID card for attendance on Monday. Picture by Prashant Mitra

A gizmo has been able to do what frequent warnings and punishments couldn’t on a Ranchi campus.

The number of latecomers and even absentees has strangely come down at DAV Kapildev Public School ever since the installation of 15 electronic attendance machines that keep a track on whether students are playing truant.

The students have to punch in their chip-enabled identity cards — which mention their name, class, section and blood group — on the gadget that automatically registers their attendance digitally. However, no student is allowed to punch in after 7am and latecomers are marked as absent.

A Mumbai-based software company, XitiX, has installed the system, for which the CBSE school charges Rs 15 per child.

“The initiative, which was taken after many students always landed up late at the school, has worked wonders. The children as well as their parents have become more conscious now after we started marking those who did not punch their ID cards on the machines till 7am as latecomers,” principal M.K. Sinha said, added that the system enabled them to identify the latecomers, who were punished.

“They were asked to solve 50 sums before attending classes and if they still continued with the habit of turning up late, we summoned their parents and sent them back home. In extreme cases, the students were suspended,” the principal said.

The measures yielded results as the parents are now taking that extra effort to ensure that their wards reach school on time. In fact, they have also benefited from the move as the system keeps them posted about the whereabouts of the children. As soon as a student records his or her attendance digitally, the parent gets an SMS alert.

“If the parents do not get SMS alerts for some reason, they immediately contact the school authorities to know whether their wards have reached or not,” Sinha informed. The guardians, on their part, agreed that they were now a relieved lot.

“The issue of attendance had become a major cause of concern. I used to get complaints from the school authorities as my son was often late. I was worried as it was bound to affect his studies. But the authorities assured me that the problem would be tackled soon and I am happy that my son is now particular about reaching school on time,” said a parent of a Class IX student on the condition of anonymity.

However, the students do not have to punch in their IDs while leaving the school premises. If anyone gets stuck in the school due to some academic reasons, parents are promptly informed.

A similar attendance monitoring system will be introduced in other DAV group of schools, mainly DAV Public School, Hehal, DAV Public School, Hazaribagh, and DAV Public School, Giridih.

“We are hopeful that the new system will change the overall education system in the next few years and bunking classes will become a thing of the past. We are also planning to introduce GPS system to track the location of school buses, as bandhs and protests have become frequent these days with our students often getting caught in traffic,” Sinha said.