Smart IDs on students: the good, the bad and the ugly

Several schools in India have introduced ‘smart’ attendance systems to keep a tab on students. Here’s what you should know about them

“Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed – no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres in your skull.” That’s George Orwell in 1984.

Orwell’s dystopian epic eerily predicted how the world would succumb happily to authoritarianism and surveillance-powered governance practices. Clearly he wasn’t talking to a school-going child in India or elsewhere. But this could ring true to a school-going child in India, given the surveillance obsession of parents and teachers in the country.