Bengaluru: After first-grade colleges, the department of pre-university education is planning to roll out a facial recognition-based attendance system for its govt PU college lecturers.

The system is expected to improve the attendance and accountability of lecturers. “Many lecturers are also assigned additional colleges where there is shortage of staff. However, at present, we are not able to monitor whether they are covering the additional responsibilities in a timely manner. The facial recognition-based system will be geo-tagged and will increase accountability among lecturers,” said Bharat S, director of the department of PUE.

A similar system is currently in effect in the department of technical education. While the department of collegiate education has also planned to roll this out, the process is still under way.

“We’ll have a meeting with the department of e-governance and hope to roll it out by the end of Oct,” he said.

The department of school education and literacy also plans a facial recognition system for students in govt schools. While it was announced in the budget of 2025, it is yet to see a rollout.

“After lecturers, we hope to implement a similar system for students. The trouble is that there should be one common device, but taking a photograph of each student will take a lot of time. So, the centre for e-governance has developed an algorithm that will capture multiple students in a single shot. We want to start with a small pilot, at the govt PU college in Malleswaram 18th Cross,” he added.

There are around 7,700 govt PU lecturers. The department is also considering introducing the system at aided colleges. “We hope it has an impact on the academic reforms and ultimately helps in improving the II PU pass percentage,” said Bharat.

The department is also charting out other initiatives to improve results for the 2026 exam season. “We realised that after the portions are completed by Dec/Jan, there is a large gap to the exam scheduled in March. We want to engage students during this period so that they continue to be immersed in academics,” he added.

Last year, the II PU pass percentage was 69.1%. Almost 6.4 lakh students took the exam.