NEW DELHI: Delhi school kids, beware! Big Brother MCD is watching you. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi soon plans to attach GPS tags on school bags of children in government schools to ensure they don’t bunk class. It is an advanced version of a pilot project initiated in mid-2016 in one school of South MCD to prevent proxy attendance.
A radar sensor fitted at the school gate will read the motion sensor chips imbedded in students’ identity cards. Each time a child enters or exits the school building, parents get a message on their registered mobile numbers. As the project gained momentum, it turned out that some students who were given digitised identity cards would pass them on to friends sitting in class or simply leave them on the school premises before cutting class.
“We are thinking of tagging school bags. But only after studying the feasibility will we launch the project in all the schools,” Yashpal Arya, Chairman, South MCD Education Committee, told The Sunday Standard.
The latest addition to digitised student attendance projects will push up the annual expenditure per student from Rs 100 to Rs 1,000 after the GPS monitors are tagged. A dedicated website to monitor locations of the bags will also be set up in schools. There are around 10 lakh students in 1,800 schools run by the three municipal corporations.