A block education officer in Karnataka’s Gulbarga has found an ingenious way of ensuring teachers of government schools don’t bunk classes. He has asked them to share their live location on WhatsApp.

Gulbarga north block education officer Veeranna Bammanalli had last week instructed teachers of 207 government schools under his control to “voluntarily” share their live location to ensure they are present from the morning assembly till the end of class hours.

While Bammanalli didn’t make it mandatory, the officer said most teachers have complied.

“We had received complaints from schools that some teachers have been skipping the morning prayer that starts at 9.50am while some others bunk classes. Faced with this issue, we found this GPS technology as an efficient tool to ensure their attendance,” Bammanalli told The Telegraph on Friday.

“We issued the instruction a week ago but made it clear it was not mandatory. However, I am happy to say that a majority of the teachers have complied with it and have been sharing their live location in a dedicated WhatsApp group,” he said.

While the state education department already has an online tool named Students’ Achievement Tracking System (SATS), which also has a feature for teachers’ attendance, Bammanalli believes WhatsApp is more user-friendly.

The WhatsApp group is monitored by officials, including the cluster research person, and the block resource centre to track the number of teachers who log in before prayer time.

Bammanalli hasn’t received any complaints from the teachers.

“Some of them have been reluctant to share locations. But we are fine with that since all we want is their presence in schools,” Bammanalli said.

He couldn’t share the number of teachers who are complying with the directive.

The use of the popular messaging app for something that it was not designed for has been attributed to the geographical position of the newly carved-out Kamalapur taluk in Gulbarga district, which should ideally have its own block education office and related staff.

“Kamalapur is about 50km from our office in Gulbarga. But there are schools located 10-20km from Kamalapur, which is 60-70km away from our office location. Although there are cluster resource persons assigned to monitor the presence of teachers, it often becomes difficult to travel such distance each day. Hence we came up with this idea,” Bammanalli said.

Functionaries of the government teachers’ association could not be reached for comments.

D. Shashi Kumar, general secretary of the Associated Managements of English Medium Schools in Karnataka, said: “I welcome the idea of ensuring that teachers are present in schools. But why WhatsApp? Why not SATS?”

“Since our school ensures teachers attend classes regularly we don’t need SATS. But it’s important that government schools keep a tab on teachers since Karnataka already suffers from a poor student-teacher ratio,” said Kumar, whose organisation represents around 17,000 private schools.

According to the report of the Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE) released in November 2022 by the Union education ministry, Karnataka has a poor student-teacher ratio.

The student-teacher ratio reported by the Unified District Information System for Education was 23:1 in 2021-22 against 21:1 in 2020-21. An ideal student-teacher ratio is 9:1.