Central Government employees attendance system goes online…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.
