In a move that could ensure transparency and offer easy access to important documents, the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU), Hyderabad and the school education department of Telangana government are going digital with their online initiatives. The JNTU-H is planning to build a massive online networking system to detect fake faculty members in engineering colleges while the school education department is planning to digitise important school documents.
Though both the initiatives serve different purposes, they represent the growing trend of e-management in education institutes. The JNTU-H has recently proposed to build an online network to store academic documents and bio-metric data of students and faculty. The attendance of both will be linked to the bio-metric system through a separate network that will be directly connected to the university’s website.
With this, the JNTU-H can monitor the attendance of teachers of 400 colleges on the website. For this, the bio metric data of around 2.35 lakh students and 50,000 faculty members will be stored in the system, say JNTU-H officials. Once it begins functioning, colleges can no longer appoint ineligible candidates as faculty members just to get approval from the inspection teams.
It will also help the shcools to preserve their documents in a better manner. Currently, all schools in the state including the government-run and private schools still maintain only hard copies of important documents. Most of them are in a bad shape due to poor maintenance. Recently, the department has realised that schools are unable to preserve their records due to lack of facilities. “Many schools are finding it difficult to maintain and preserve the records for decades. Digitisation could offer them an opportunity to ensure better maintenance,” says a senior official. “We asked all DEOs to collect the data from schools to begin the process,” he adds.
