North MCD's 'smart attendance' drive exposes digital divide among teachers
New Delhi: The Education Department of North Delhi Municipal Corporation's Narela Zone issued a fresh set of orders for its school teachers and principals on Wednesday. North MCD's Director of Education held a meeting on February 16 where it was decided that all principals, teachers and class-four employees will start marking their attendance on the MCD Smart App compulsorily within a week. "Employees who fail to mark/register their attendance on the Smart App should be ready for Inter-Zonal/Inter-MCD transfer", the order further reads.
However, several class four employees do not have and cannot afford new smartphones. Moreover, most of them do not know how to operate a smartphone. North MCD will not provide any monetary or technical assistance in this regard even though the new rule will most likely affect its employees' livelihoods quite adversely. Further, several MCD teachers have reported issues with downloading and using the app on their phones, apart from increased internet/data charges incurred.
This is especially problematic because North MCD teachers have not received their salaries for about 5 months now. To complicate matters even more, this MCD Smart App is not available on the Google Play Store and has several privacy glitches. One North MCD teacher said that despite several efforts, the app was not registering on her smartphone so she continued to mark her attendance physically in her school's attendance register. Another North MCD teacher from Narela Zone said that he received a link for the app from a colleague. Both said that the app asks for access to their location history, pictures, contacts and more. After a week, when this order comes into effect, employees will only be able to apply for any kind of leave solely via this app.
The order also directs "teachers to try and shift students from offline to online mode (of teaching)". A North MCD teacher in a school in Narela Zone said" "Most students who come to our schools don't belong to the kind of social or economic background where every family member has a smartphone. Often there is no smartphone, only a normal button-type phone. If there is a smartphone, it is shared between the whole family and the father or mother probably take it to work with them in the morning. So, the children can only use it at night that too not for long because they cannot afford the internet data charges. How can we expect them to afford it when our own class four employees get a Rs.10-15 top up done to make missed calls at most?"
