TIRUCHY: With most posts, including office assistants, record clerks and clerical staff, in government and aided schools vacant, teachers are forced to skip classes in order to complete uploading students’ data on to the Educational Management Information System (EMIS) website.
EMIS, managed by Tamil Nadu Educational Information Management, contains data of students of government, aided and private schools. Details include Aadhaar and community details, among others. The pilot project was implemented in 2011-12 . Students would just have to his or her Unified District Information of School Education (U-DISE) code when joining a new school without needing a transfer certificate (TC).
The task is proving to be a tough proposition for headmasters and teachers as the server crashes at regular intervals. The deadline to input data is a few days away, adding to their predicament. Mostly computer science teachers are instructed to input student data and they have to miss out on teaching. “I have to upload pictures and data of students. By the time I finish, I cannot be in my class. This is a major problem,” said a computer science teacher.
A headmaster said that it takes about 10-20 minutes to enter the data and teaching loses out in the process. He called for a separate post for EMIS in all schools. M Kumaravel, Tiruchy district president, Tamil Nadu Promoter Post Graduate Teachers Association (TNPPGTA), said, “The only solution is to appoint a data operator in every school to stop academics from suffering.
Though the benefits of the project are many, technical shortcomings with the website are creating problems. The headmaster of a government school said the project has not been implemented to the fullest yet. “Data of higher secondary and class X students are almost done because they are outgoing students. But the process of enrolling new students for the EMIS card is yet to take off,” he said, Moreover, the headmaster said printing of card hard copies and lamination has not been done in any school in the State.
Another teacher said EMIS would be useful for registering scholarships, educational loans or even getting admission to colleges. He said co-ordinators of the EMIS project in each Tamil Nadu district should come out with solutions to problems.
A source in the Chief Education Office told Express the final date to upload data is December 18 but it may change as the project is not being properly implemented across the State.