ShaalaOS

The problem

Small private schools in these towns run on paper. Fees are tracked in ledgers, attendance lives in registers, and parent communication happens by phone call, or not at all. Compliance reports for SATS and UDISE+ are filled out by hand, costing days of staff time each cycle.

The existing school ERPs do not fit. They are English-first, priced for large CBSE chains, and built for a parent who reads English on a smartphone. The real parent here speaks Kannada and may not read fluently. The office wants speed, not features.

Our approach

Start narrow and earn the next step.

• Ship the daily wedge first: fees, attendance, parent updates
• Make every daily action fast and reliable on a mid-range Android phone, even on a weak connection
• Use AI to remove data entry, never to make decisions. AI proposes, the office approves
• Add compliance next, because that is what makes a school stay
• Add academic tools last

Design principles

• Kannada first, English second. No user-facing English is hardcoded
• Daily actions never wait on the network. Writes queue locally and replay when the connection returns
• A human confirms anything the AI produces before it becomes official
• Money and attendance edits are logged. Nothing is hard-deleted
• Daily actions respond in under a second

What is inside

• Fee recording with receipts and automatic reminders
• Class attendance, present by default, with absence alerts to guardians
• Two-way parent queries over WhatsApp in Kannada, by text or voice
• AI onboarding that digitizes admissions and student records
• Compliance reporting for SATS, UDISE+, the RTE quota, and mid-day-meal records

The pilot

The first deployment was at St Joseph's High School in Hunsur. We started with a focused tool: a teacher leave and substitution app built from the school's real timetable of 20 teachers, 9 classes, and 411 weekly assignments.

A teacher applies for leave from their phone. The system proposes substitutes ranked by subject match and free periods. The principal approves in a tap, and the cover is assigned. It replaced a manual, paper-based process that ate into every morning.