The Sindh Education Department has selected six districts, including Karachi East, to pilot a facial recognition-based attendance system aimed at curbing absenteeism and improving monitoring of school staff.
The other selected districts are Hyderabad, Naushahro Feroze, Ghotki, Jacobabad and Umerkot.
According to 2026 data, Sindh’s school education workforce comprises 207,440 employees, including 59,136 women and 148,304 men. The six districts selected for the pilot have a combined staff strength of 49,565, including 14,281 female and 35,284 male employees.
Education Minister Syed Sardar Shah said the districts had been chosen to test the system in varied urban and rural environments before expanding it across the province.
He said the initiative was intended to bring greater transparency to school attendance and ensure more effective utilisation of human resources.
“For the first time, we will have verified, real-time data on who is present in school and when,” he said, adding that reliable attendance records were essential for improving learning outcomes and institutional discipline.
The minister said the application had been designed to be user-friendly, with arrangements in place to identify and resolve technical issues promptly.
Hyderabad has the highest staff strength among the selected districts, with 13,729 employees, followed by Naushahro Feroze with 10,703 and Ghotki with 7,117.
Karachi East has 4,444 employees, including 2,680 women and 1,764 men, giving it the highest proportion of female staff among the selected districts.
The department said the system would use facial recognition and geo-fencing through a centralised mobile application to record and verify attendance. Each attendance entry would be linked to the employee’s HRMIS profile, school records and geographical coordinates, allowing officials to monitor attendance through real-time dashboards.
Officials said the system was aimed at preventing absenteeism and proxy attendance while strengthening administrative oversight.
Registration and authentication are being carried out jointly by the Human Resource Management Information System, the Directorate General of Monitoring and Evaluation, district and town education officers, chief municipal officers and IT teams.
Teachers and non-teaching staff have been registered with photographs, CNIC numbers, contact details and posting information. Their profiles are linked to the GPS coordinates of their respective schools.
When an employee marks attendance, the application verifies their location against the school’s registered coordinates, recording both “in” and “out” timings.
The department said teachers would not need to own smartphones to use the system and could record attendance through a head teacher’s or colleague’s device. They would also be able to view and download their monthly attendance records through the application.
Leave applications could likewise be submitted and approved online, the department said, adding that the FRAMES application was available on both Android and iOS platforms.
Officials said the pilot would help identify technical and operational issues and improve training before the system was expanded to all districts of Sindh.
