National online registry for Indian students kicks off amid controversy
Testing for the Indian government’s Apaar project begins in Assam. Each student will have a profile linked to the Aadhaar (the Indian digital identity system) with their entire school history. Education activists are concerned that the risks of Big Brother and exclusion in a country where too many educational establishments lack even basic services.
New Delhi (AsiaNews/Agencies) – The Indian government is developing a single online registry for all students in India, the Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry (Apaar), which is being tested in the state of Assam.
The goal is to create an online "academic bank" to store information on the credits earned by students during their high school studies. Each student is assigned a 12-digit identification number, which is generated from the Aadhaar, the Indian digital identity card.
Back in October 2023, the Indian government wrote to the states and Union territories, asking them to seek the consent of students' parents to generate their Apaar numbers, promising that the data will be kept confidential.
Despite the government's reassurances about the benefits of this initiative in improving interactions between school establishments, many activists who spoke to the Scroll website expressed concerns about the project in a country that is still a long way from universal digital literacy and where many schools are still without basic services.
“This initiative is intended to divert the attention of parents and children from the basic issue of poor quality public education,” said Niranjanaradhya VP, a Karnataka-based education activist.
Anil Kumar Roy, an education activist in Bihar, cited the Aadhaar digital identity as an example of the problems that can arise when technological initiatives are imposed from above on a society that is not yet truly digitally literate.
He noted that thousands of students in Bihar have been deprived of various benefits, such as direct transfers of money to their families, precisely because they did not have bank accounts or Aadhaar cards.
“They rely on the staff in cybercafes to do this work. If Apaar is introduced, it will push students out of schools,” he fears.
The government claims that thanks to the new data from Apaar it will be able to better monitor schools and therefore reduce dropout rates.
Prince Gajendra Babu, the state secretary of the State Platform for Common School System, Tamil Nadu, told Scroll that the government already has a database of the number of students in the system.
In fact, “There are already measures in place to address the issues,” he explained. What is needed “is to improve these systems and to ensure they function properly.”
Activists also argue that a system like Apaar would allow the government to monitor students too closely and would therefore pose a threat to diversity and freedom in education.
Some fear that such a large database could allow the government to classify students according to their political ideologies and identify dissenting voices.
“Schools don’t have toilets, drinking water, basic infrastructure, and there are so many single-teacher schools,” Niranjanaradhya explained. “The government should be solving these issues first. Instead, it is making things more complicated by introducing these complex ideas.”
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