Thiruvananthapuram: The Central Government is in the midst of collecting individual details about school students as part of a major effort to create a comprehensive database.
The schools are required to directly upload the information regarding the students studying in classes from Pre-primary to Plus Two onto the UDISE+ (Unified District Information System for Education Plus) portal of the Department of School Education & Library that comes under the Union Ministry of Education.
Fifty-four types of individual information of students including their name, UID Number, community, family's financial background, health, academic performance in the previous years, phone number of parents, email id, etc are being collected.
Every year, the Centre collects details of teachers and schools in the state through the UDISE+ portal, but stopped short of seeking the individual details of students so far.
The Department of General Education, Kerala, also collects basic details of students of Classes 1 to 10 through the comprehensive KITE portal and that of the higher-secondary students through the ‘hscap’ portal. But it collects only 20 types of information through ‘Sampoorna’, the one-stop source for all details of students developed by KITE.
The schools will have to collect and upload the additional information sought by the Centre. They also will have to furnish the details of pre-primary students, which the state is not collecting. Additionally, the Union Government has sought details of students who completed school education in the last academic year, which the schools have to submit first.
The data-collection exercise is being coordinated through the Samagra Shiksha Kerala (SSK), through which the State implements various centrally assisted education projects.
The State has, so far, provided to the Centre only the information regarding the number of students. The latter has raised many queries with regard to the data provided by the State concerning centrally assisted projects like the Mid-Day Meal scheme. It is in this scenario that the Centre is directly collecting the details from schools. This will equip the Centre with a much larger database of students than that available with the State.
The Director of General Education issued a circular to the schools, asking them to furnish the information in a careful manner.