Seva Mandir cut teacher absence with student-taken timestamped photos

Seva Mandir ran roughly 100 informal one-teacher schools for children in rural Udaipur, Rajasthan, who fell outside the government system. Each school had exactly one adult present, so there was no colleague, principal or parent on site to vouch for whether the teacher had come to work; unannounced inspector visits were rare, predictable, and easy to schedule around. Teachers were paid a flat monthly salary regardless of days worked, and self-reported attendance registers were trivial to falsify.

The obvious fixes were the ones every NGO and ministry already tried: send more inspectors, moralize about duty to students, or dock pay for absences reported by the teacher's own register. All three depended on the same broken link — verifying, at low cost, that a person was physically present in a remote village on a given morning — and none of them fixed it. More inspectors meant more cost for a marginal gain, since visits were still infrequent and predictable enough to dodge; docking self-reported pay just gave teachers a reason to under-report absences rather than reduce them.

Had a student photograph the teacher with a tamper-proof timestamped camera at start and end of each day, and paid per verified day instead of a flat salary.

Flat salary made absence costless, so teachers skipped often.

Timestamped photos made presence cheap to verify daily.

Pay per verified day made attendance directly incentivized.

Daily verification closed the gap between true and punished absence.

When verifying dispersed workers is costly, make proof automatic and cheap, then tie pay to it.

Teacher absence in camera schools fell from about 44 percent to roughly 21-22 percent, close to half the comparison group's rate, and students gained about 30 additional instructional days a year. A year in, test scores in camera schools were 0.17 standard deviations higher than in comparison schools, and children were substantially more likely to be admitted into regular government schools afterward. The program cost about $120 per teacher a year, worth roughly $0.11 per extra day of schooling delivered per child.