BENGALURU: The Director for School Education and Literacy (Pre-University) will be introducing a facial recognition system to record the attendance of lecturers and principals in PU colleges across Karnataka from December 2025.

An official from the Department of Pre-University Education said, “Currently, there is a biometric system to record the attendance of lecturers in the colleges. However, it is not centralised. Attendance gets recorded at the college level itself. The current facial recognition system is a centralised one which means the director of PU department can access and keep a tab on the attendance of lecturers and principals. An app called Karnataka Attendance Management System (KAMS) has to be downloaded by lecturers, principals and clerical staff of a college.

When they come to college, they need to login, click a picture which captures the address or geotag of the location of their college, and upload it to KAMS. Some lecturers are on deputation to two different colleges. In such cases, they have to upload their picture when they visit both colleges on particular days.”

This is not the first time the facial recognition system has been introduced in the college. Earlier this year, the system was introduced on a pilot basis in one of the PU government colleges in Gadag, which yielded positive results.

The official told TNIE, “The centralised system removes the hassle of spending money for maintenance of biometrics. Every college in the state has purchased it from different vendors, so the vendor charges whatever he wants and when the machine goes faulty, they don’t even attend to complaints, especially in rural areas.”

Karnataka has 2,000 government and aided PU colleges with around 7,627 lecturers. Introducing the facial recognition system was also announced in the State Budget 2025–26.