Enforce biometric attendance in colleges, guv tells state varsities

Mumbai: Governor C P Radhakrishnan, chancellor of public universities in the state, has asked all vice-chancellors to make biometric attendance mandatory for staff and students in universities as well as affiliated colleges, reports Yogita Rao.His directive comes amid concern over low attendance in colleges. While principals agree that falling attendance must be tackled, they say implementation of such a directive could be challenging.Mumbai University consequently issued a circular on June 24 for university staff and said that salaries would be linked to attendance. This has been opposed by university staff. It, however, hasn’t issued any directive for students yet.

The Governor’s directive says attendance should be monitored regularly. While many universities use a biometric attendance system for teaching and non-teaching staff, no such arrangement has been introduced for students.Public universities in Maharashtra are yet to issue circulars to enforce the Governor’s directive. One vice-chancellor termed it a ‘sensitive’ issue. A city college principal said they do have a biometric system for students entering the campus, but not for attendance in each lecture.

“The implementation will be challenging, the university will not be able to monitor the functioning of around 900 colleges. Moreover, colleges have failed to impose the 75% attendance norms. Barring a few colleges where the attendance rules are strictly followed, many are unable to get students to attend lectures,” said the principal.Another principal pointed out that the universities do not have data on the number of teachers in affiliated colleges.

“Aided colleges still have some structured systems in place, at least for the aided courses, but many unaided colleges run without any consistent regulation,” said the principal.An educationist, on condition of anonymity, said the only way to fix the problem is a stringent directive from govt. “The govt should enforce the attendance norms through the universities and instruct them to take stringent action against colleges flouting norms. Universities should be asked to set up flying squads to conduct surprise checks to find out if lectures are being conducted. If students are not attending lectures, they should be debarred from exams,” said the educationist, adding that it is a systemic problem and will take efforts from multiple stakeholders to resolve.TOI had earlier spoken to principals, who cited poor attendance in classrooms as one of the reasons for poor results in university exams post the pandemic.

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