In an effort to combat teacher absenteeism, the Andhra Pradesh government will deploy facial recognition software to nearly 1.89 lakh government teachers. The teachers will have to record their own attendance twice a day through the system.

A pilot project will be launched by the Department of School education over the next month in four zones of the state, with the help of four different vendors. In the Guntur district, the model was deployed last Saturday and from Monday. Currently, teachers are punching in their attendance through an Aadhar-enabled biometric attendance system.

"Under this facial recognition system, teachers can also give their attendance from their mobile phones. But they have to be present in the school as this Unified District Information System for Education (U-DISE)-linked system records the longitude and latitude of the place where the teacher is present," said Ramesh Kumar, state nodal officer of the project.

The government said that this step was to ensure that there is accountability and discipline in the state-run institutions. The system will send attendance to officials via SMS to confirm teachers are present or absent from school. Parents will also receive SMS updates on their children's arrival and departure from school.