UT to develop software for student, teacher data

Naina Mishra

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 25

Punjab has proven to be a poor mentor to Chandigarh as far as the adoption of ePunjab School Management Software and the online teacher transfer policy is concerned.

Around two years ago, the UT had approached the Punjab Department of School Education for adopting the ePunjab School Management Software and online teacher transfer policy for computerisation of data related to school, teachers and students. This was under the State Mentoring Programme for exchanging best practices of states and UTs for improving the quality of education, under the aegis of the Ministry of Human Resource and Development.

The cost of software is in lakhs, however, it would have costed nothing to the UT under the programme. 

Punjab Education Secretary Krishan Kumar refused to comment on delay in the exchange of best practices.

The UT Education Department has now written to the Society for Promotion of IT in Chandigarh (SPIC) and National Informatics Centre (NIC) for developing its own software for digitising students’ attendance and transfers’ data, confirmed Education Secretary BL Sharma.

Although, Chandigarh was ranked first in the Performance Grading Index (PGI) report of 2017-18 with 841 points out of 1,000, it lost points for not being able to record daily attendance of students digitally and transferring teachers through a transparent online system.

In the Performance Grading Index, the indicator ‘Number of teachers transferred through a transparent online system as a per cent to the total number of teachers transferred’ accounts for 20 marks and ‘Percentage of average daily attendance of students captured digitally’ accounts for 10 marks.

Punjab always had an edge over Chandigarh in the aforementioned indicators and had scored full points in school grading index against these indicators.

Sources in the Punjab Education Department confirmed that the sharing of students and teacher management software was being delayed on purpose — to have an edge over the UT in the Performance Grading Index.

UT portal

The online teacher transfer portal of the UT will be developed to ensure fair and transparent allocation of teachers. Assessing teachers’ shortage and surplus posts at each school will become easy for rationalisation of posts through the online software.

Currently, students’ data up to Class VIII is being recorded in a mobile-based application, Phoenix, developed by the SPIC. The app tracks learning and teaching in Chandigarh government schools.