17 Jul 2021
Teachers and staff members at state primary and upper primary schools across the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh are protesting the requirement that they use a digital attendance system to log their entry and exit times. Among the problems: the system was introduced without a trial period to solve
22 Dec 2023
Schools in Hyderabad, the capital of the Indian state of Telangana, are using facial recognition to take morning attendance. Telangana is also using facial recognition to pay pensions, renew driving licences, evoting, and deter crime. Adoption was partly fueled by fear of spreading covid-19 through
19 Aug 2024
The Delhi government is expected to introduce facial recognition in schools in order to improve attendance, which is hovering at 65-70%. The government also proposes to provide parents with monthly attendance reports and introduce monthly and weekly tests in order to keep students engaged. Educators
09 Jan 2024
A platform that will serve as a central data repository for India's One Nation One Student ID is due to start operation in February 2024. The 12-digit student ID (Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry) is liked to students' Aadhaar biometric IDs and has so far been issued to 20 million
28 Oct 2021
The Indian online educational services company Byju, which sells a live online one-on-one learning platform in the US, UK, Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico, has aggressive plans to expand in the US and is seeking acquisitions there and in the UK and Australia. In 2021, it acquired the digital reading
07 Aug 2024
An assessment camp for disabled children who attend government schools run by the Samagra Shiksha integrated scheme for education in the Indian state of Telagana required eligible children to bring with them a state government-issued disability certificate indicating a more than 40% disability, two
09 Nov 2023
The 746 KGBV schools in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh say the schools’ facial recognition attendance system has helped improve both students’ and teachers’ attendance. KGBVs are residential schools intended to educate girls from impoverished backgrounds. Link: Face-recognition Tech helps KGBV in
15 May 2020
Many of India’s informal workforce of 450 million people - 90% of the total workforce - were abruptly closed out of their places of employment when prime minister Narendra Modi abruptly ordered a lockdown in April. Left without pay, unable to stay in their living conditions, and with only limited
27 Jun 2020
More than 2,500 foreign Muslims from 35 countries travelled to India to attend a mid-March gathering held with government permission at the Tablighi Jamaat headquarters in Delhi in mid-March. A day later the government issued a notice limiting events in Delhi to 50 people and a week later grounded
11 May 2020
The Indian state of Madhya Pradesh created a COVID-19 dashboard that displayed the names of at least 5,400 quarantined people, their device IDs and names, their OS version, app version codes, current GPS coordinates, and office GPS coordinates. Shortly after the dashboard's existence was posted on
10 Apr 2019
An investigation by Bloomberg, disclosed that thousands of Amazon employees around the world are listening in on Amazon Echo users.
22 Feb 2019
In February 2019, an examination of Facebook's searchable database of Indian political ads showed that in India political ads on Facebook were viewed nine times more often by men than by women. Facebook's Indian user base was reported as 24% female in 2016. The reason for the disparity in ad viewing
19 Feb 2019
In February 2019, Twitter announced it would expand the political campaigning policy it launched in the US in May 2018 to all EU member states, Australia, and India, commencing March 11. Once the policy is live, only certified advertisers would be allowed to run political campaign ads on the service
13 Dec 2018
In December 2018 reports emerged that the Indian Electoral Commission would propose amendments to the Representation of the People Act 1951 that would require citizens to link their Electoral Photo ID Card to their Aadhaar number with the stated goal of improving the accuracy of the electoral rolls
18 Nov 2018
As part of the digital campaign to win re-election, in mid-2018 the BJP, which controls the Indian national government as well as that of the state of Chhattisbarh, handed out $71 million worth of free phones and subsidised data plans to 2.9 million of the state's voters and then used the phones to
