After BEST buses, its now the turn of colleges to usher in smart card convenience. Tired of truant teachers and students, the Shree Vile Parle Kelvani Mandal trust which has under its aegis seven of the city's reputed colleges, is now planning to introduce smart cards and fingerprint scanners to keep tabs on regular attendance in classrooms.

The trust got to work immediately after the brouhaha last year when the Forum for Fairness in Education filed a case in the High Court against Mithibai college for allowing students with poor attendance to appear for final exams.

``The manual attendance system was not foolproof and we have had parents questioning its validity,'' Mukesh Patel, Rajya Sabha MP and president of the executive committee told Express Newsline

. He hoped this system would help enforce the High Court's directive upholding the university's rule ofcompulsory 75 per cent attendance.

The system called the Time and Attendance Management System (TAM) is now undergoing trials at the Narsee Monjee College of Commerce at Vile Parle and will soon be installed at the Mithibai college. Fifty teachers have already been issued cards on a trial basis.

The TAM, which replaces the venerable attendance register, works on the bar coding principle utlised by major department stores. Both students and teachers are given cards which they have to validate on a scanner. The scanners are hooked onto a computer network in the college, which churns out monthly readouts of a person's attendance.

``The system will also be installed in hostels to prevent unauthorised persons from entering,'' says executive committee member Jagat Kilawala.

The system developed by Intellicon Pvt Ltd will be installed in all the six colleges administered by the trust by January next year at a cost of Rs 26 lakh. Cards will be issued to all teachers and students in the colleges.

Trusteessay the two colleges are a study in contrasts. While NM boasts of an attendance of over 80 per cent, in Mithibai the attendance is just 20 per cent.

``During a surprise check at Mithibai last year we found that 15 per cent of students had zero attendance,'' says Mukesh Patel.

However, students are not entirely gung-ho about this new technology. ``With over 10,000 students, Mithibai is amongst the largest colleges in Asia,'' says Latif Shaikh. ``Can you imagine the prospect of thousands of students and teachers queuing up to validate their cards?''. He added that machines would have to be installed outside every classroom to ensure attendance.

Another student, Sohail Khan, feels that the existing system could well be streamlined. ``Paper registers are the best, they are least time consuming and can easily be filled up by professors.'' He suggested that care be taken to ensure that sheets in registers were not misplaced as had happenned in the past.