also update the same at regular intervals.In simple terms, the child tracking system would as an extended Village Education Register (VER) whose information is available to everybody in the web. This extended VER will lose its relevance if the same is not updated at regular intervals.

Need For Validating the Database

ICR Technology has certain advantages over conventional data entry process. It processes huge amount of datasheets in short period of time and converts the scanned images to database. Roughly in about 4 month – period starting from survey in October 05, we were able to put the entire data of 106 lakh children in the database by February 06.

But there are certain limitations of the ICR Technology. The errors made by enumerators in filling up the ICR formats get magnified by the scanning and consolidation process. It was observed that only errors in village name were to the tune of 25 percent of all the forms!!! It has now been reduced to less than 5% or a state average basis. But for some districts like Mayurbhanj, Kandhmal, Angul etc; this error is still in double digit percentage!

Similarly, the entries made in other fields like name of child, guardians name, relation, DOB, educational status, mother tongue, religion, category, disabilities type etc also have errors which need to be checked at the field level and have to be corrected. This requires for more efforts than the original survey because each and every field have to be checked with ground reality and then corrected.

Minute details have to be checked and correctly filled in by the validators. Next, the corrected/validated formats have to come back to a central location for manual correction of the database either at the district servers or at the state servers.

By this process, a clear database can be generated for all the children in the 0 – 14 year age group, which will be authentic & useful. We plan to give a unique code number to each child after this exercise.