India’s schools are increasingly being asked to run through digital systems—recording attendance, maintaining student data, submitting reports, and monitoring government schemes online.
But in parts of rural India, where reliable internet access remains uneven, the country’s shift towards digital school administration is creating a new problem: schools are being asked to participate in systems they cannot always access.
In Vathuampui, a remote village in Mizoram’s Lawngtlai district, teachers say poor mobile connectivity is making it difficult to keep up with school administration that now depends heavily on the internet.
Attendance, co-curricular assignments, official reports and information related to the government’s midday meal programme must be submitted online. Still, teachers say the network frequently fails when they need it most.
The issue came to a head on August 16, when the Pang Zirlai Pawl (PZP), a local youth organisation, switched off an Airtel tower in Vathuampui after what it said were months of complaints about poor connectivity.
The organisation gave authorities three days to improve the network and warned that it would take further action if the situation remained unchanged. Lawngtlai Deputy Commissioner Donny Lalruatsanga subsequently intervened and contacted Airtel officials over the issue.
But for teachers, the problem is not new.
“Because the network around our area is poor, we are unable to properly submit teachers’ attendance and VSK/UDAS attendance,” said Lalrotluanga Hrahsel, a teacher at Synod Home Mission School in Vathuampui. “We are told to submit the attendance properly, but when the signal is poor, we simply cannot do it. The same applies to matters related to the midday meal.”
VSK/UDAS is part of the digital school-monitoring system through which schools submit attendance and other routine information online.
Hrahsel said the disruption extends beyond attendance. Photographs of the school or tree-planting activities must be sent through the internet, while PDF documents and official reports frequently fail to upload. Even banking transactions required by the school can become difficult when the connection drops.
“Sometimes we can make phone calls, but even today the signal is poor. Even when we try to send PDFs, they keep failing to upload,” he said.
The school has so far been able to continue providing midday meals despite difficulties submitting the required information. But the experience raises a question: what happens when schools are required to monitor and report the delivery of a government welfare programme digitally, while the infrastructure needed to access those systems remains unreliable?
India’s schools move online
The problem is part of a much larger transformation in how India collects and manages information about its schools.
The country’s first major school information system, the District Information System for Education (DISE), emerged in the 1990s to collect school-level information for planning and monitoring. In 2012-13, DISE was merged with the secondary education information system, SEMIS, to create the Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE).
The more significant shift came with UDISE+. Developed from the 2018-19 reference year, UDISE+ made online uploading of school data mandatory and introduced built-in validation and verification at the block, district and state levels. The system was designed to exchange information more efficiently and has since become the central school education database used across India.
The digitisation has also moved into daily school administration.
The first phase of the Union government’s Shaala Darpan project was launched on June 5, 2015, covering all 1,099 Kendriya Vidyalayas.
The system included student attendance, employee information, leave management, report cards and SMS alerts relating to student and teacher attendance. The Centre subsequently circulated the model to states for consideration, while several states developed similar systems of their own.
Even school meals are being digitally monitored
The shift is particularly significant for India’s school meal programme.
The Mid-Day Meal Scheme, renamed the Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman (PM POSHAN) scheme in 2021, has its own digital monitoring architecture. The PM POSHAN Management Information System collects monthly information from schools, including the number of meals served, food-grain use and other implementation indicators.
More importantly for schools such as the one in Vathuampui, the programme has an Automated Monitoring System (AMS) for real-time monitoring. Schools report the number of meals served each day and, where meals are not served, the reasons for the failure. States can collect this information through SMS, interactive voice response systems, mobile applications or web applications, with the information feeding into a national system for monitoring at the state, district and block levels.
The central PM POSHAN system continues to display reports on schools where meals were not served, where food grains or funds were unavailable and where meals were served below specified levels.
When the system cannot be reached
In Vathuampui, teachers say they are not resisting digital systems; they simply cannot reliably access them.
PZP president Albin Lalhruaitluanga said the network problem affects more than 200 students across schools in and around Vathuampui. When the connection fails, teachers struggle to communicate homework and assignments, he said.
“We have been facing this problem since November last year,” Lalhruaitluanga said. “We have spoken to Airtel officials many times and have also approached the government. Sometimes the network improves for a short while, but then it becomes poor again.”
The PZP has repeatedly submitted complaints to the government and approached Airtel officials directly.
“We want to appeal to Airtel to improve the network in Vathuampui and the surrounding areas as soon as possible,” he said. “We want the problem to be addressed quickly so that the network in the area does not continue to deteriorate.”
A 2023 communication from the Ministry of Education to states noted that the PM POSHAN Automated Monitoring System was intended to provide real-time information and asked states to ensure correct and timely data entries. The ministry also acknowledged that daily reporting remained low in many states and called for stronger monitoring and technical support.
An old education gap meets a new digital one
The network problem comes against a longer history of educational disadvantage in Lawngtlai.
An EastMojo report published on July 2, 2024, “How political indifference turned Mizoram’s Lawngtlai into a black hole for students,” documented persistent educational problems in the district, including teacher shortages, infrastructure gaps and language barriers. The report also highlighted concerns raised by residents of Vathuampui over the quality of government education.
More recent reporting has continued to examine Lawngtlai’s educational disadvantage, even as Mizoram has projected itself as a leader in literacy.
An EastMojo investigation in May 2025 questioned how Mizoram could be declared India’s first fully literate state while significant disparities persisted between districts. A further report in April 2026 examined the structural reasons behind Lawngtlai’s poor examination outcomes.
Also Read: Explained: Why Chakmas in India want India to annex Chittagong Hill Tracts
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