Parivar Pehchan Patra enrolment: Teachers struggle with technical snags, lack of training

Government school teachers in Gurugram, who have been roped in to create unique state identity cards— ‘Parivar Pehchan Patra (PPP)’—for students and their parents, have been facing various hurdles ranging from technical snags to lack of training since the exercise commenced on Monday.

Schools across the state have been directed to help in the creation of PPP cards— which will enable people to get benefits under various state welfare schemes at their doorsteps— from August 25 till September 5.

Suman Sharma, principal of government model senior secondary school in Sector 4/7, said there were technical issues due to which the process of uploading details of families was getting disrupted and was taking place slowly. “The PPP portal is not able to handle the load due to which the data doesn’t get updated. While teachers are working, the output depends on sheer chance. Our operators have been facing these challenges for the last three days. Most of them are staying at work till late evening to ensure that work gets done,” said Sharma.

Under the initiative, which was launched on August 4 this year, it is mandatory for each family to register themselves on the PPP portal to avail welfare benefits. School teachers collect, verify and upload data of students’ families on the portal for the generation of the identity cards.

An English teacher at a government school, who did not wish to be named, said besides struggling with a lack of technological know-how, teachers were also facing the wrath of irked parents. “Most of us are of the view that some training should have been imparted before the initiation of a crucial exercise. All of a sudden, without any training, teachers were assigned various tasks under the initiative. Parents are getting irked due to the delay and hold us accountable thinking that we are not working. No identity cards could be made in the first two days and only some were made today (Wednesday),” she said.

The Haryana School Teachers Union has also opposed the move of involvement of teachers in the entire process. Satyanarayan Yadav, deputy vice-president of the union, said that they were opposed to the move of enrolling the services of teachers without any training. “Teachers did not receive any demonstration or training that would have helped them in familiarising themselves with the process. All schools are not fully equipped with computers and other requisite devices. Due to these constraints, many teachers have been struggling with the execution of the exercise,” said Yadav.

Sangeeta Chaudhary, district elementary education officer (DEEEO) who is also the district project coordinator , said teachers were facing issues since the online database for registering details was under stress because of high traffic. “School heads have flagged issues pertaining to the exercise. Most of them have informed us that the website is not working. In all likelihood, this is due to the increased traffic on the website. Snags are arising since this is a state-wide exercise where multiple people have logged in together at the same time,” said Chaudhary.

On the subject of training teachers, Chaudhary said a training session through video conferencing would take place on Friday. “A training session for a set of teachers will be taking place tomorrow (Friday). They’ll further train the rest of the teachers. The issues that have been raised so far will be discussed and resolved,” she said.