40% of registered
central government employees absent from work – attendance.gov.in
Blame it on Urban
development minister M Venkaiah Naidu. He made a couple of surprise visits to
his ministry in June and July and a government attendance website was launched,
which is throwing up stunning figures of attendance in central government
offices. If attendance.gov.in is to be believed, nearly 40% of central
government employees tend to be absent from work on any single working day of
the week. Attendance.gov.in is a live website and tracks attendance minute by
minute
For example, on
Friday, October 10, of 50,587 central government employees registered with
attendance.gov.in, the recently launched “attendance website” by the Modi
government, only 27,553 were present. The remaining 22,000 odd employees had
not turned up for work for whatever reason.
The story of this
bureaucratic-lethargy started when, soon after taking charge of the Urban
development ministry, Naidu checked into Nirman Bhavan, once on June 12, and
then on July 28. “That is when late coming to office was noticed. Shri Naidu
then directed ministry officials to take necessary measures to ensure
punctuality at work,” says a PIB note issued on August 13.
Very soon biometric
attendance marker systems were installed in Nirman Bhavan. Other ministries
followed suit, and the ‘Babu’ was forced to answer to an electronic roll-call,
mornings and evenings. Attendance.gov.in was simultaneously launched. It took
some days but now the website is in full flow, and throwing up numbers that
tell the story in numbers.
Modelled on the lines
of Jharkhand government’s attendance website, it has a dashboard which gives an
overview of daily attendance activity of every employee registered with it, and
will very soon become a centralised database of and for all central government employees.
The numbers on
attendance.gov.in show that the biometric attendance system has so far not done
much to change Babu-behaviour. Playing truant continues though “late coming to
office” might have stopped to an extent.
The figures are
graphic on attendance.gov.in. Bureaucratic-lethargy is seen across the board,
cutting across ministries and departments. For instance, in Naidu’s ministry of
urban development (MOUD), where it all started, 345 employees were present on
Friday, out of a total of 463 biometric-registered employees.
Other departments did
not depart from the script. Out of the 1006 self-registered and
department-verified employees of the department of rural development, only 429
marked attendance on Friday. In the case of ministry of water resources, the
numbers were 1034 and 439. Directorate general of supplies and disposals
(DGS&D): 1143 and 409. Department of Science: 351/889. The total at all
these four departments: 3487/9846.
In CPWD, which too is
governed by the MOUD, of the 6444 registered employees, on 754 were on
attendance on Friday. Contacted by dna, CPWD’s nodal officer for biometric
attendance, K C Singh, said, “I am not competent to speak on this issue.” He
was dead serious. A call to the Ministry of Finance elicited a somewhat similar
reply. The person who answered the call said, “Please call on Monday. I do not
know the name of the nodal officer.”
As of Friday, 149
government organisations & departments had registered with this unique
attendance website. More are expected to sign in. The ubiquitous Babu is
finally under the scanner, and unwilling to talk of the experience.
Attendance.gov.in is doing all the talking.
source : DNAINDIA.COM
