Improving the quality of education in Govt. Schools is a prime concern today. Government Schools across the country lack basic facilities, and this affects the quality of education imparted. Quality of education is inextricably linked with attendance of teachers and students, student- teacher ratio, the quality of facilities such as Mid Day Meals, Drinking Water, Toilets and the Assessment and Performance of students.
According to a report titled "The Fiscal Cost of Weak Governance: Evidence from Teacher Absence in India" by K Muralidharan from the University of California, published by National Bureau of Economic Research, it was observed that reducing inefficiencies by increasing the frequency of monitoring could be over ten times more cost effective at increasing the effective student-teacher ratio than hiring more teachers.
Our challenge was to build a Real Time Monitoring and Evaluation Solution that is sustainable enough to manage real time data of 2000 schools. We also had to maintain a robust system, ensure marking was done by the right people inside the school campus and during school timings.
Apart from building a M&E solution, the challenge was to make it work in remote areas i.e. the solution had to work EVEN WITHOUT THE INTERNET!.

When we started working on DISHA EmpowerU, we Market Researched with every stakeholder, on ground level challenges of monitoring and district level challenges of problem detection and efficient decision making. Schools at Giridih District, Jharkhand, lacked basic quality of facilities, had no set method to track attendance of teachers and needed a proper tool to assess performance of students. We collected data from these schools and analyzed how this data could be used to build an integrated solution that could perform both 'Real -Time Monitoring' and 'Smart Action Response'. We worked closely with officials at Giridih and took various inputs from them to finally build EmpowerU - A Real Time Monitoring & Evaluation Solution with inbuilt Intelligence to detect issues. The estimated time for completion was around 1.5 years. But our team worked extremely hard to build this unique "Monitoring and Evaluation System" in just 71 days!

Analytical Platform for Monitoring Education and e-Governance
EmpowerU improves Quality of Education by bringing transparency and accountability to the system, leveraging Information Technology and Data Analytics. It monitors and analyses data such as Attendance of teachers and students, Leave Requests, Infrastructure, Learning , Performance and Assessment of students. It enables data driven decision making thus helping Government officials better their administration. It also provides statistics based on the data, that is analysed to close all the gaps in the Education System.

EmpowerU has solved all ground level problems efficiently in the following ways:

• MIDDAY MEAL MANAGEMENT has been made efficient through daily monitoring, which ensures meals are cooked as per menu and under hygienic conditions. This has improved serving from 75% to more than 90%.
• TEACHER & STUDENT ATTENDANCE is monitored through Attendance Marking & GPS based Location, even in remote areas WITHOUT the INTERNET.
• SCHOOL FACILITIES like Libraries, Toilets, Drinking Water and Computer Labs are monitored through Pictorial & Survey based Monitoring.
• STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOME is monitored through periodic assessment.

EmpowerU was inaugurated by the Hon'ble Chief Minister Raghubar Das, and has been successfully implemented in more than 1000 schools across Giridih, that monitors more than 5000 teachers and 1 lakh students!

To Watch the journey of EmpowerU ,click the link below:

https://youtu.be/5CW3Rj-HDN0