A newly launched facial recognition attendance system designed to track teachers and non-teaching staff in Sindh government schools encountered technical failures on its first day of operation, prompting employees at several Karachi schools to fall back on manual attendance registers rather than the new digital process. The Facial Recognition Attendance Monitoring and Evaluation System, known as FRAMES, entered its pilot phase on Monday across six districts, namely Karachi East, Hyderabad, Naushahro Feroze, Jacobabad, Ghotki and Umerkot, with the pilot phase covering a combined total of 49,565 teaching and non-teaching employees.
At Idara Sharqia Government Girls Secondary School in Jacob Lines, Karachi, teachers attempting to mark their attendance through the FRAMES mobile application encountered repeated error messages, including notifications indicating that the server was busy and that the school had not been properly assigned to the user attempting to log in. Multiple attempts to record attendance through the application failed over the course of the morning, and efforts by staff to reach relevant authorities for a resolution went unanswered, ultimately forcing teachers to record their attendance manually using the older paper based system the new platform had been intended to replace.
Under the design of FRAMES, employees are required to mark their attendance upon arrival and departure using the mobile application, which verifies each individual’s identity through facial recognition technology before logging the corresponding attendance time. The system has been built to function without requiring an active internet connection, and also allows staff to submit leave applications and download monthly attendance records directly through the application, features intended to consolidate several administrative processes into a single digital platform rather than requiring separate paper based procedures for each function.
Speaking to the media, teachers at the affected schools said the initiative could ultimately improve transparency and help identify employees who continue drawing salaries without maintaining regular school attendance, a longstanding concern within the public education sector. They noted that the official reporting time under the system is set at 8:15 a.m., and that most teachers typically arrive ahead of that deadline, adding that a functioning digital system would create an immediate and verifiable record of both punctuality and absenteeism among staff. Muhammad Khawar, the in-charge at Idara Sharqia Government Girls Secondary School, described the initiative as a positive step that gives teachers an opportunity to become familiar with newer technology, and suggested that similar digital systems should eventually be extended to other government institutions to improve administrative transparency and efficiency more broadly.
The malfunctions raised questions about the system’s readiness as authorities work to replace the existing paper based attendance process with a digital mechanism intended to improve transparency and curb absenteeism across public schools in the province. Teachers and school administrators said they hoped the technical issues identified during the pilot phase would be resolved before the system is expanded further, with officials expected to review the results from the current pilot districts before proceeding with a phased rollout of FRAMES across the rest of Sindh.
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