The Delhi Government has decided to place CCTV cameras inside classrooms of two of the schools in Delhi as trial basis. The promise to install CCTV cameras inside every class of the schools in the state was made by the Delhi government in their budget speech. The CCTV cameras would be able to check the teacher absenteeism and could turn out to be a heavy hand to maintain kids with their behavior in class. Education Minister and Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi, Manish Sisodia visted Sarvodaya Bal Vidyalaya, Gokhla Marg, Mori Gate and Rajakiya Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya, East Vinor Nagar to see demonstrations of the newly installed cameras and teacher and students reaction over it.
In three classrooms of Moti Gate School the Delhi Integrated Multi Modal Transit System Limited (DIMTS) has installed camera way back in July. There was another private company which installed cameras in 12 classrooms at East Vinod Nagar a few days back. There would be 24 hour surveillance, live feed and audio facilities in the cameras. If there is any tampering that happens in front of any teaching space there would an alert sent would be sent immediately. Sisodia has plans to install the same cameras over 70000 classrooms and laboratories in schools around the state. There would be central control room apart from control in principals of schools. The central control room would monitor every classroom centrally at the state level.
There are strong reservations against this degree of surveillance and huge cost that is associated with it that are coming through various educationists and opposition political party members. Some of the teachers are also against this kind of surveillance over the classrooms in schools. According to a twelfth grader at SKV, Chanchal Ganesh, “We’d sometimes eat during class but now don’t”. According to another child Shivani Sharma, “Sometimes I lose focus and then, suddenly, remember the camera.”
