Automation of Tracking School Dropouts; Back2School
In this unique initiative the District Collector of Krishnagiri (Tamil Nadu, India) has introduced an online system for tracking school dropouts of the district and to bring them back to school. This model could be adopted across various districts in India to keep the school dropout rate under control.
BusinessWeek magazine called India as a nation of dropouts. Based on a national survey in 2005, the school dropout rate was around 7% in the age group of 6-13 years. In an effort to bring the rate of school dropouts under control, the District Collector of Krishnagiri, Dr. Santhosh Babu has introduced an online tracking system aptly named as Back2School. Back2School claims to be the first online system in India that tracks dropped out school students in a district and take efforts to bring them back to main stream. The work on the system started in 2007. The tracking system is not available for public access, but the complete information about the system is available in the site.
The process is very straight forward, but labor intensive. Initially the volunteers collect the bio-data of the target students with photographs. Then on a quarterly basis the volunteer collect status of the students. The status reports includes information like if the students have dropped out and the reason for dropout. The data is uploaded to an online system at the Panchayat/Block Office. The online system has a dashboard, which can be accessed any time for up to date information on the students in Krishnagiri District. Based on the information the officials can take decisions to introduce new or modify existing schemes for these children.
Update: Here is a video of the launch of this website in December 2007.
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