The zero attendance policy prevails for most of the courses at IIT Kanpur and it is pretty cool.
This kind of liberty provided by the college provides students with many great alternatives to complete their syllabus on time. Students can find their own comfortable space for studies.
Either they can attend a class or they can do that course online(with the help of MITOCW or NPTEL).
Otherwise what is the point of attending a class just for the sake of attendance if you end up sleeping and not getting even a word of the professor.
So the idea behind this whole system was to let students explore and make their own choices about their academics rather than spoon-feeding.