Nirantara — Karnataka's Statewide AI Facial-Recognition Attendance Rollout for 5.2 Million Students

In its 2025-26 state budget, Karnataka's Chief Minister Siddaramaiah announced 'Nirantara' ('continuous'), an AI-based facial-recognition attendance system for the state's Department of School Education and Literacy, intended to replace manual roll calls across all government and aided schools. The system converts each student's photo into an encrypted, vector-based biometric ID, integrated with the state's existing Students Achievement Tracking System (SATS) and linked to Aadhaar, India's national identity system. Software and data are hosted at the Karnataka State Data Centre (Vikasa Soudha, Bengaluru).

The primary goal is to automate daily attendance capture in place of manual roll calls. Officials also plan to use the same mobile app to track delivery of welfare schemes such as midday meals and free footwear.

Teachers use a dedicated mobile app to photograph the classroom, which the department says can register the attendance of 50 students within seconds, including in low-light conditions. Following a pilot in Uttara Kannada district that officials described as successful, the state approved a phased rollout beginning in the 2025-26 academic year.

The approved rollout covers 52,686 schools — 46,460 government and 6,226 aided institutions — reaching more than 5.2 million students, with full statewide coverage targeted for 2026-27. As of mid-2026, no independent third-party study of recognition accuracy, error rate, or effect on attendance or learning has been published.

This contrasts with comparable systems elsewhere, such as Paraná, Brazil, where an academic accuracy audit and a teachers' union survey were later commissioned. Officials describe the encrypted-ID design as a privacy safeguard, but no data-protection impact assessment has been made public, and collecting biometric data from more than 5 million children — tied to Aadhaar — raises unresolved consent and retention questions. At 5.2 million students, Nirantara would be among the largest deployments of biometric school-attendance technology anywhere.