21.78. A key challenge for e-monitoring is the
absence of high-quality data that is updated on a
frequent and reliable basis. Infrastructure such as
the Unique Identification (UID) could be deployed
to keep track of student enrolment, attendance, and
dropouts, and biometric authentication could also be
deployed to improve teacher attendance.
21.149. There would be special focus on Aadhaar
linkage of teachers and students databases with a
view to remove ghosts, fakes, duplicates and cleaning
up databases. This linkage coupled with effective
analytics can help in addressing accountability,
traceability and measurement-related challenges. It
could also be used for tracking students and teachers
attendance, tracking deployment, training programme
attended by teachers, their skills/capability
areas and so on. Using this targeted deployment plan,
skill development programme could be developed.
Tagging records of students with those of teachers
can help build accountability of teachers. In long
run, this may also provide pointers to interventions
(made at teachers’ improvement areas) that have had
a higher impact on improving learning outcomes.
Aadhaar seeding would be used in tackling scholarship
funds misuse. Recently, Andhra Pradesh has
used it to identify fake student enrolments, same student
enrolments in multiple colleges/courses, same
faculty teaching in a large number of institutions.
Aadhaar-enabled payment system could be used for
transferring and managing scholarship payments.
Box 21.11
Student Financial Aid Programme (SFAP)
- Cover higher education at all levels—undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral and post-doctoral research and include
general as well as professional education;
• Cover significant costs of education in determining scholarship amounts and establish a mechanism to linking its revision
to change in price index;
• Earmark a fixed proportion of these scholarships for SC, ST, SEBC, Minorities and Person with Disabilities as per the
existing policy;
• Create a multi-dimensional ‘Index of Disadvantage’ that measures the inter-sectional dimensions of inequality that
gives due weight to caste/community, gender, poverty and rural background and provide additional scholarships and
individual-oriented financial aid schemes linked to such an Index;
• Simplify processes, self-certification and linkages to the unique identity numbers under the UID scheme; and
• Implement a single portal for delivery of all scholarships under the Central Government and explore the possibility of
allowing States to join and integrate their student financial aid programmes with this single portal.