DALTONGANJ: Every morning, the six teachers at Upgraded Plus Two School in Sohri Khas village, 41km from here in Palamu district of Jharkhand gather at the courtyard. In their hands is a tablet connected to a biometric reader on which they have to record their thumbprints for attendance. The problem is the internet connection is frequently absent. This forces two or three of the teachers to climb a palash tree in the school campus while the students watch. On a good day, they get a weak connection high on the tree’s branches.“There is no internet connectivity on our campus at all. We can access a very weak 2G network if we climb up the tree and wait, but even that is quite unreliable,” says Arpan Kumar Gupta, a science teacher in the school. The six teachers are all between their late 20s and late 40s, and not all of them can climb the tree, certainly not every day. The rest have to fall back on conventional methods.“When the tablet does not connect to the internet, we mark our attendance on the register. There has to be some record,” Gupta adds.They are not alone in this predicament. Across northwestern Jharkhand, teachers at several schools have been unable to record their attendance online, as part of a new state government initiative, because the infrastructure in the rural parts of the state is just not up to the task of handling digital connectivity demands.Under the Gyanodaya scheme launched by chief minister Raghubar Das in 2017, the state government began distributing tablets to schools. The devices were preinstalled with the e-Vidya Vahini app, which records biometric attendance of teachers and also monitors the admission and drop-out rates and other parameters.Periodically, progress reports on teachers and students, academic performances and inspections (which are filled by the respective cluster or block resource person) are also to be filed through the app. The government has come up with another app to monitor the midday meal scheme. The school at Sohri Khas, which has 800 students, got the tablet on September 25. The palash tree has been their saviour ever since.Schools which have between 201 and 1,000 students have received two tablets, while those between 1,001 and 2,000 have three, and those above 2,000 have four. Over 20,000 of the 35,000 eligible schools in Jharkhand have received the tablets so far. But the ambitious project has hit the realities on the ground.The Palamu district administration says it is “looking into” the problem. “The issue has been brought to my notice. I have asked the blocklevel education officer to investigate,” Palamu deputy commissioner Shantanu Kumar Agrahari says.Till such time that the infrastructure catches up, Palamu’s school teachers will be forced to climb trees or continue to rely on paper registers.

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