Daltonganj: If you are a government schoolteacher in a Palamau village and want your biometric attendance recorded, better be nimble at climbing trees.
The Raghubar Das government’s digital dream needs a leg up on a palash tree on the campus of an upgraded plus two school in Sohree Khas village in Satbarwa block, 41km from Daltonganj.
Since September 25, when Palamau district administration gave the co-educational school with 800 students a tablet for biometric attendance, such tree-climbing gymnastics for four teachers and two para-teachers became an alarming reality after it was discovered the 2G network only “catches” on a particular branch.
If a teacher wants his biometric attendance recorded, he climbs the palash tree with the tablet and waits on the branch for internet connectivity to appear. When it does, he presses his thumb for scanning. On rare times the thumb scan succeeds, in most cases the screen blinks “scan failed”. Then, it’s the next teacher’s turn.
“Internet connectivity is dismal at Sohree Khas. It doesn’t come inside our two-storied school building. On one branch of the palash tree, it blinks and disappears. We keep waiting for internet. This tree-climbing business wastes a lot of time. Many times we can’t catch the Internet. We keep the old attendance register as a back-up,” said science teacher Arpan Kumar Gupta.
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