Bihar: Online attendance via e-Shikshakosh a ‘burden on teachers’ but has curbed absenteeism

For the past two-three days, Ashwini Pandey has been unable to sign out of his teaching duty. A computer science teacher in Bihar’s East Champaran district, Pandey and every other government school teacher in Bihar is required to mark their attendance online via a mobile phone app, the E-Shikshakosh. But heavy rainfall in north Bihar has meant glitches in the network.

Introduced as a pilot in early 2024 and then implemented statewide in September, the E-Shikshakosh is aimed at reducing teacher absenteeism in Bihar’s government schools. It is part of a raft of reforms introduced by the Nitish Kumar-led government to strengthen school education; widespread changes in recruitment policies was another.

But as Pandey’s experience – and that of dozens of others – shows, the app has brought problems of its own.

Glitches in the app and internet connectivity are frequent and a grievance redress mechanism, practically non-existent. According to Pandey, also spokesperson for Bihar State Teachers Association, over a 1,000 teachers have been penalised and had their salaries docked due to the app.

In September 2025, Bihar government directed that student attendance should also be tracked on the app. It promised tablet PCs for all schools for the purpose. That is yet to be implemented. Teachers hope the next government will ditch the app and implement biometric attendance instead and involve the heads of school in monitoring and tracking. Polling for the Bihar Assembly elections 2025 is in two stages – on November 6 and 11 – with results due on November 14. The Nitish Kumar-led government in Bihar has been pushing for more teacher recruitment and the state domicile policy for teacher hirings.

Enter: E-Shikshakosh

Online attendance via the app was introduced when several district officers across Bihar found that teachers weren't coming to school regularly or on time, impacting teaching. Many found other ways of dodging the attendance system.

“Earlier, many teachers came to the school, marked their attendance, and went back to their homes. The attendance was maintained in a physical register. However, due to online attendance, the overall situation has improved, but still, there are several issues,” said a middle-school teacher from Arwal district of Bihar.

E-shikshakosh first came on trial-basis for a few months early last year. Later, through an order on August 27, the chief secretary, education department, Bihar, made it compulsory across schools, said Keshav Kumar, president, Shikshak Sangh Bihar, and a middle-school teacher in Motihari.

Online attendance process

The attendance recording process involves geolocation and multiple selfies.

A teacher’s ID is filled in and every time they reach school, they have to mark attendance by taking a selfie using the app.

Another Motihari middle-school teacher explained how it works: "The e-Shikshakosh app tracks our location; once we are within about 500 metres of the school, it becomes active. When we reach within 5 metres of the school, it records the time and prompts us to take a photo, and then locks our attendance once we confirm the picture. The same process has to be followed again when leaving school. Every day, we are required to mark our attendance before 9:30 AM and after 4:00 PM."

This is meant to ensure that teachers don’t simply mark attendance and take off.

Before the app, some districts had experimented with such photo-attendance by requiring teachers to send their selfies to a district WhatsApp group as a way for confirming attendance. “Even after that, the situation didn't improve. Teachers still weren’t coming to school on time or leaving early. Eventually, the attendance through the app was introduced,” said a high school teacher from Arwal, asking not to be named.

Concerns: Glitches, redress, privacy

But teachers complain that the implementation of the app and its integration with the system has left many gaps.

“The server-down issue has happened five-10 times in the last one year. Sometimes there is a bug in the app or some technical glitch is happening all the time,” said Pandey. These can lead to further bureaucratic hurdles.

Teachers say around 1,000 show cause notices have been issued to teachers based on records on the eShikshakosh app and salaries have been deducted across the state of Bihar.

“Whenever a show-cause notice is issued by the district officer to the headmaster of the school for a teacher’s attendance for a day, lower district officers and principals exploit the teachers. If attendance is not confirmed by the app, teachers have to run after the headmasters for a letter confirming their presence on a particular day and submit it to district officers,” said Kumar.

The grievance redress mechanism for the app is flawed, teachers complain. “While contact numbers are given on the app and website, no proper customer service is provided,” said another teacher from Arwal. He added, “This app is just a means to address the teacher attendance issues but hasn’t been implemented properly. The power should also be in the hands of the head of the institution. It's better if it's centralised through a biometric system.”

Apart from that, there are privacy concerns. “When the E-Shikshakosh app is installed on our personal phones, it asks for permission for photos and videos, causing a breach of our privacy, and we are against this. We assume it also tracks our day-to-day activities,” said Kumar.

He demanded that the teacher's attendance should be either taken through headmasters of schools or through a biometric system, or teachers should be provided other phones.

”Installing an app and accessing all our personal data is like policing by the government. This is against our constitutional rights,” he said. “Monitoring should happen but communication shouldn’t be one-way. Currently, this app is an extra burden on teachers.”

“None of the governments does justice to the education system or to teachers,” he continued. “All of them are profit-oriented. We expect that the next government should reform the education system, and these issues should be addressed.”

This is the first story in a series on education reforms in Bihar.