Why pay by the working day

Every year UDISE+, the Ministry of Education’s census of all 1.47 million schools, records whether each school has electricity, water, toilets and computers, and separately whether each of them works. For internet it records one thing: whether the school has a connection. 934,000 schools do. How many of those connections work on a given school day is not recorded in UDISE+.

Roll Call is that missing column, produced by the school itself, every school day, in a form a payment can follow.

India’s auditor found BharatNet’s village connections working in 33.2% of the places marked service ready. The average hides the lesson: how the network was run, and how its operators were paid, changed everything.

These figures do not prove that the payment model caused the gap, but they show how much the way a network is run and paid for can matter. Roll Call makes the thing that is paid for the thing a school needs: a working line on a school day, measured from inside the school.

The gap between a connected school and a working one is not Indian. Giga, the UNICEF and ITU initiative to connect every school, built Giga Meter because the same question has no answer elsewhere either; its open-source app runs M-Lab’s ndt7 test, the protocol Roll Call uses, in schools across dozens of countries (meter.giga.global).

Roll Call could take Giga Meter’s readings with a small adapter on the school device that signs each Giga Meter result (it already has an M-Lab test id and runs from inside the school) with the school’s probe key. What Roll Call adds is the payment rule and the public register.

1. Donors, CSR programmes and NGOs that fund school connections today and already report outcomes. They can pay in stablecoins and use the register as their report from day one.
2. Giga-style programmes that measure schools with M-Lab already, adding payment to measurement.
3. Governments last. A universal service fund that cannot hold stablecoins can still run Roll Call in register mode: the same terms, readings and marks on chain, with its treasury paying in rupees what the register says each month.

• Universal service funds (India’s Digital Bharat Nidhi and its equivalents) already pay operators to serve places markets skip. A term per school, settled daily, is a payment rail they can adopt contract by contract.
• State education departments paying for school broadband out of their own budgets, who today have no way to withhold payment for a dead line short of a dispute.
• Donors and CSR programmes that fund school connections and want to show where every rupee went. The register is the report.
• Giga-style programmes that already measure schools with M-Lab’s protocol and fund connectivity through credits; Roll Call can read their measurements instead of running its own probe.

Funders keep the money for every day that fails. Providers get something they rarely have: payment the same week for every day they deliver, from a contract that cannot be argued with.

Running one school for a year takes about 70 million gas on Base, priced live on the verify page. The cost that matters is the attester: an organisation that checks networks and stands behind its word. It can be paid a small fee per settled day by the funder; the calculator above shows how large the money it protects is next to that fee.

A probe can be any computer that is already in the school: a lab PC, the headteacher’s phone on the school Wi-Fi, or a Giga Meter installation. No new hardware is needed for a pilot.

• The school holds its probe key. Nobody else can sign its readings or close its days, and it can stop testing at any time.
• Readings carry speeds, a time and a network number. The school’s address goes on chain only as a salted hash, and M-Lab’s own data policy, which every tester agrees to, covers the address in M-Lab’s archive.
• No pupil or teacher data is involved: a probe measures the line, not the people using it.
• The rules are a public contract. A school, a provider or a journalist can read exactly what triggers payment before anyone signs.

1. One district, 20 to 50 schools that already have a fibre or wireless line and a computer that stays on during school hours.
2. The funder moves one term’s connectivity budget into Roll Call terms, with the provider’s agreement, at the price they already pay.
3. Three attesters (for example a university network lab, the funder’s auditor and an NGO), each checking every reading.
4. Real terms use stablecoins on a public chain; the funder can convert to and from rupees through a regulated partner.
5. After one term, compare days paid against the provider’s own uptime reports and against M-Lab’s archive.

Fifty schools for one school year, with every assumption written down.

At these assumptions the money a funder keeps for days that did not work pays for the attesters and the gas, with some left over. If providers ask for a higher price per working day, the calculator above shows what changes.

• The probe is in the school and stays there. A school that colludes with a provider can still fake presence by running tests elsewhere on the same network; the archive check and site visits remain the funder’s tools.
• A failed day is the provider’s fault often enough to be worth paying by. Power cuts and holidays are handled by school closures, which never count against the provider.
• Providers accept a contract with automatic refunds. The bond and daily settlement are what make it acceptable: they are paid fast for the days they deliver.
• The attesters are independent of the provider. That is why the design calls for several, and why each reading names an M-Lab test anyone can check.