On most days, Central government staff work for eight hours
The occasional surprise checks by Union Ministers to see if
government employees are reporting to work on time may not have brought in 100
per cent compliance, but employees aren’t as late to office as widely
perceived.
The Hindu got exclusive access to one
week of Central government attendance data, thanks to the first publicly
available database of employees, and found that employees tend to be a bit late
in getting to work, but most work a full day.
Two weeks ago, the Union overnment launched attendance.gov.in, a
web portal that allows live tracking of over 50,000 Central government
employees the moment he signs in and out of work.
Using a Unique Identification Number (UID)-enabled back-end, the
system allows the employees’ sign-in to be authenticated and uploaded to the
website in under two seconds. Personally identifiable information about
individual employees is not available for public view.
Getting to work at 9 a.m. sharp is still a challenge. Just over
20 per cent of the employees swiped in by 9 on most days, but attendance picks
up in the 9 a.m. to 9.30 a.m. period, when the largest number of swipe-ins
takes place. The median in-time, The Hindufound, is 9.18 a.m.
Consequently, the employees leave office a little late, with 5
p.m. to 5.30 p.m. being the swipe out time among most. The median exit is 5.45
p.m.
The
numbers show that on most days — except Friday, the last working day, — eight
of 10 Central government employees worked for at least eight hours. This figure
is only indicative as some employees appear to be making errors while swiping
in or out.
Junior employees come in earlier than those higher up the
bureaucracy, but this could be on account of the fact that senior bureaucrats’
days often begin with meetings in other offices and locations, an Additional
Secretary whom The Hindu reached
for comment said.
“We are very clear that what we are offering are the tools for
measurement. Decisions on what to do with attendance data is not our job — that
is for the personnel ministry,” Ram Sewak Sharma, Secretary, Department of
Electronics and Information Technology, who is responsible for the project,
told The
Hindu.
Mr. Sharma launched Jharkhand’s version of the attendance portal
during his stint there as Chief Secretary after his posting as Director-General
of the Unique Identification Authority of India.
Individual employees’ data in the new Central government portal
is not available for public view, but the organisation shared one week’s data —
after anonymising it — with The Hindu for
analysis.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/govt-employees-start-work-late-stay-late/article6515579.ece
