The Indian state of Tamil Nadu has introduced back2school, a unique web-based programme under the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan- the flagship education programme- to track school dropouts in one of its districts.
All the 8,867-odd children in the district will be targeted to be back in school by December, 2007. The new initiative is a web-based software for tracking and monitoring all out-of-school children. The programme works two fold: in the first phase, data about all children of school going age in the district is collected and collated. The software generates a unique id for every child in the central database for tracking its further development. In the second phase, a group of volunteers at each of the panchayats periodically collect basic information about each child and update the details on the system. Though the project is currently restricted to Krishnagiri district, the standardised processes with the entire software in place will make it easy to replicate.
