The School Education Department has begun collecting the profile of every student studying in government, local body as well as private schools in the district for the purpose of issuing smart cards with individual identification numbers.
The information is being collected through a proforma issued to individual schools with a request to get the forms filled by the parents along with their signatures, cross check the details with school records and then forward them to the department with the school seal.
Details required
Details required to be provided include the name of the student, date of birth, gender, medium of instruction, nationality, community, sub-caste, blood group, mother tongue, names of parents, their income, residential address, native district and contact phone numbers.
The department also wants to know if the students are suffering from any physical deformity and whether they belong to the "disadvantaged group" which includes orphans, HIV affected, transgender and children of scavengers. Details of their siblings should also be included.
On their part, the schools have been asked to provide details such as the attendance record of their students and the enthusiasm shown by them in participating in block, district, division, State or national level sports competitions.
Apart from those following State government’s Samacheer Kalvi (uniform syllabus), institutions following Central Board of Secondary Education, Indian Certificate of Secondary Education and International General Certificate of Secondary Education syllabus also have been asked to collect their students’ profiles.
Multiple purposes
Chief Educational Officer C. Amuthavalli said that the data collected from the schools would be used for multiple purposes such as keeping track of the students’ academic progress and making schools accountable for non-implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act. The students’ profile would be fed into school education department’s portal for generating individual identification number for every student and subsequent printing of smart cards which would serve as a one point reference to identify a child even if he/she had shifted schools.
"We are also mulling over the feasibility of linking the smart cards with ration cards and the Centre’s Aadhar card so that it becomes easy to keep a check on school dropouts and make sure that every child pursues compulsory education up to Class VIII," she said.
