In ‘Digital India,’ Jharkhand Teachers Climb Trees In Search Of Internet To Mark Attendance

Every morning, the six teachers at Upgraded Plus Two School in Sohri Khas village, 41km from here in Palamu district of Jharkhand gather at the courtyard. In their hands is a tablet connected to a biometric reader on which they have to record their thumbprints for attendance. The problem is the internet connection is frequently absent. This forces two or three of the teachers to climb a palash tree in the school campus while the students watch. On a good day, they get a weak connection high on the tree’s branches.

“There is no internet connectivity on our campus at all. We can access a very weak 2G network if we climb up the tree and wait, but even that is quite unreliable,” says Arpan Kumar Gupta, a science teacher in the school. The six teachers are all between their late 20s and late 40s, and not all of them can climb the tree, certainly not every day. The rest have to fall back on conventional methods.

Click Here: Golf special

TOI