Central Government employees attendance
system goes online…
It can be monitored by public also
It can be monitored by public also
Public
eye on babus – Portal that records every move
New
Delhi, Oct. 9: India’s cricketers may have escaped thanks to their board’s
allergy to technology, but the country’s government has unleashed its own
hawk-eye and sneakometer on its babus.
Not
only is Big Brother watching the pen pushers, even the public can now keep a
tab on them through a web portal, attendance.gov.in.
It
tells you which babus reported for work on any given day, how punctually they
arrived, if some of them left midway and where. It even provides a graph on
each employee’s attendance trends to reveal how often he tends to take leave.
The
portal went live quietly on September 30, covering 50,233 employees across 149
offices in Delhi. The idea is to enrol the capital’s one lakh-odd central
government employees on the scheme before bringing the rest of the country
under it, a senior official said.
A
senior official at the National Informatics Centre, the agency for e-government
initiatives, said the idea had come personally from Prime Minister Narendra
Modi in July. The source insisted that there had been “no complaints” from the
babus about the scheme being intrusive.
At
6.45pm today, the attendance dashboard on the portal showed a figure of 26,951,
which means less than 54 per cent of those enrolled had turned up to work.
The
system is based on the Aadhaar biometric identity card, launched by the
previous government, that now covers 68 crore people.
Every
employee who has such a card has to enter the last six or first six digits of
his Aadhaar number into a device at the entrance to his office, and then
undergo an iris and fingerprint scan. Senior civil servants can do it without
queuing, using devices attached to their workstations.
The
process is repeated while leaving. If a babu goes to some other government
office on an assignment during work hours, his arrival and departure is marked
there too.
The
National Informatics Centre source said the idea was not just to improve
punctuality but to “weed out ghost employees and proxy attendance and instil a
sense of equality among staff”.
Not
everyone is happy.
“I
can’t understand how the number of leaves I take is a matter of public
interest,” said a senior bureaucrat who didn’t want to be named.
Another
bureaucrat pointed out loopholes. One, if an employee wants to slip out for a
while, there’s no way of ensuring that he records his departure in the machine
at the gate.
Two, as
a bureaucrat said: “If I have a meeting with the home secretary and go to North
Block, everyone will know I was there but can anyone guarantee that I actually
met him? So, how can this guarantee better output?”
He
regretted the “move to have control over the bureaucracy” through a “weird
public display at an increasing cost of governance, with expensive biometric
devices and what not”.
Once
the portal receives cabinet approval and is formally launched, all central
government employees will have to register themselves with it. Those who lack
an Aadhaar card will have to get their biometrics done.
As of
now, the Prime Minister’s Office is not enrolled, though sources said it had
approached the National Informatics Centre to get registered with the portal.
Neither
cabinet secretary Ajit Seth nor foreign secretary Sujatha Singh is registered
yet. The highest number of enrolments is from the Planning Commission, which is
on its way to extinction.
The
nine-day-old online register shows that home secretary Anil Goswami has not
visited his North Block office the past four days.
Suhaib
Ilyasi, editor of Bureaucracy Today — a magazine for and about the country’s
bureaucrats — said the response had been positive.
“People
like it even though they have to be punctual,” he said. “There is no sense of
intrusion.”
But a
bureaucrat asked why the scheme didn’t cover the ministers.
“Politicians,
who call themselves public servants, have kept themselves out. If attendance is
so important to this government, why have half the cabinet ministers skipped
work to go camping in poll-bound states?” he said.
It
isn’t clear whether Modi would be enrolled.
Source
: The Telegraph