Hyderabad: The state govt has incurred a wasteful expenditure of Rs 29 crore by implementing the Aadhaar-Based Biometric Attendance System (ABAS) to record teacher-student attendance in schools without due feasibility study and assessing technical data requirement, said CAG in its report.
After a lot of deliberations with stakeholders and changes in plans, the govt finally decided in 2018 to implement ABAS in 9,349 schools of 12 selected districts, based on the results of the National Achievement Survey and on the criteria of high dropout rate.
It was decided to provide 12,705 biometric devices and 9,349 IRIS devices at a revised cost of Rs 72 crore. During the review meeting in March 2019, it was observed that only 64 per cent of teacher attendance and up to 16 per cent of student attendance was recorded on the biometric devices for the period Oct 2018-Feb 2019. The huge mismatch in student attendance was attributed to lack of updation of students’ biometric data in the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) database.