25.5.16

`World's largest' student tracker

Come February 2017 and the government will launch probably the world's largest student-tracking programme, Shala Asmita Yojna (SAY), that will have a ready database of 25 crore school-going children. ASMITA is the acronym for All School Monitoring, Individual Tracing Analysis.
The prime minister's office has given the go-ahead for SAY, which intends to use Aadhaar numbers to track the educational development of students, be it their attendance, enrolment, dropping out, mid-day meals, toilets and other related parameters like teacher transfers and learning assessment of children. The initiative will cover 15 lakh schools and 77 lakh teachers of government and government-aided schools.
Children without an Aadhaar number will be given unique identity number for tracking.Many states like UP , MP and Delhi already have unique identity numbers for children. HRD ministry sources said that when the children get an Aadhaar number, that will replace the unique identity number. While mid-day meal has had a separate database, it will now be merged with SAY. One of the benefits, a senior official said, would be that leakages can be tapped.
“Having common data will help deal with the huge loss to the exchequer,“ the official said. The software to evaluate the data will be developed by National Informatics Centre on the basis of a matrix provided by the Human Resource Development ministry .




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