Latecomers to schools, it’s time to pull up your socks! Now, not just the school teachers, but parents too will be updated about their children’s arrival and departure time in schools. A Vizag-based startup Unihalt has developed a biometrics roll call reporting system for educational institutions to bridge the gap between student-parent-institution interactions. Founded by brothers Ravi Teja Konathala and Ravi Raja Konathala, the firm has already installed the biometric attendance system with eight institutes in and around Vizag and 27 institutes in other parts of AP and Telangana.
The idea to start a biometrics attendance system first struck Ravi Teja when he was pursuing his engineering course in Bapatla Engineering College near Guntur. Interestingly, it was his own experiences that led him to stumble upon this concept. “During my B.Tech days, I used to be often late to college and would end up missing two classes almost every day. Once my father was summoned to the college since I had issues to get promoted to the next semester due to lack of attendance. That’s when he got to know that I am missing the first half of college daily,” recollects Ravi Teja. Annoyed with his habit of getting delayed every day, Ravi Teja’s father asked him to call from a coin box telephone in front of college every morning to know what time he is entering the college. “That experience stayed with me and I decided to work on a concept so that parents can keep track of a child’s attendance and also ensure the child’s safety,” says Ravi Teja.
Unihalt was started in 2012 and later expanded to Vijayawada and Hyderabad. It is currently incubated in the Sunrise Startup Village and is in the final stage of raising investment. Apart from the Konathala brothers, the core team of Unihalt has Ashish Saran who handles the PR and Marketing and Lakshman who is the Operations in-charge.
Before starting the venture, the team did a market study which revealed that 90 per cent of educational institutions follow manual attendance process, which lacks efficiency and accuracy. Also, the study said that three per cent of students arrive late to school every day.
Unihalt provides biometric devices to institutes for free of cost and registers every student onto the system. “Our service is integrated with SMS and mobile app which any parent, who would like to use our service, can opt for. Every parent availing the service will receive an SMS or notification with regard to the student’s ‘in and out’ time from school instantly. This way, the institute will be able to manage attendance electronically and parents can be at peace knowing the whereabouts of their children. Generally in every schools, teachers manually mark daily attendance in registers but they don’t have metrics to track late-coming students. They can’t keep a record of the late comers. We help them with that as well,” says the Unihalt team, who are aiming to increase the student punctuality by 35 per cent through the implementation of the system.
Schools in Vizag can avail this service for free for the first academic year. Later, a nominal fee will be charged from those parents who are interested to take the service via app.
The team is currently creating a parent-teacher communication and feedback platform.
