Guwahati: The department of communication and journalism of Gauhati University has introduced a better and more transparent attendance system through a mobile app from the 2018-19 session.

This comes a year after the installation of biometric machines in classrooms for online attendance in the physics department of the university.

Head of the university's department of communication and journalism, Ankuran Dutta, said: "The excellent characteristic of this app is that the daily update on attendance is sent as a text message to the mobile number of each of the 37 students in one semester. The app is linked to the mobile number of students. It is better and more transparent than any other online attendance system."

One who misses a class gets a text message immediately.

Vice-chancellor Mridul Hazarika said developing an online attendance system is a "good practice". "We do not regulate attendances, it is left to the department," Hazarika said.

Last year in August, the physics department had successfully introduced a biometric machine in classrooms for an online attendance system.

"We have a biometric machine for checking students' attendances which has been running successfully for a year. It is a transparent system of counting attendances," head of the physics department Madhurjya Prasad Bora said.

"We have to punch the machine thrice within a regular interval of one hour for four classes in a day. This has made us conscious as we will be marked absent even after punching five minutes later than the allowed time," third semester student Rahul Khan of the physics department said.

"Instead of carrying attendance registers to classrooms, we will now have roll calls of students in mobile phones. The mobile app is developed with a list of students' names semester-wise with columns of roll numbers and present/absent for a finger click," Dutta said.

Khan added that the physics department is about to install another machine for semester III and IV classes shortly. "But the problem is - we are in a fix sometimes after the attendance list is put up at the end of a month. The biometric machine is everyone's favourite as we do not know our status immediately unlike the mobile app," he said.

"Present or absent, students can now keep their own record of attendance. We cannot keep our own record through biometric machine," said Palash Das, a student of communication and journalism.

Earlier this month, Madhya Kamrup College of lower Assam inaugurated a web-based online student-attendance management system at the initiative of its principal in-charge Harendra Nath Talukdar.

"We become the first college in Assam to introduce this online system of taking students' attendance. Information on attendance is immediately stored in a database," said Talukdar.