By Devirupa Mitra
Published: 12th Oct 2014 06:06:02 AM
R S Sharma sent a letter to 150 odd officers
NEW DELHI: Central government employees in the capital have only a fortnight left to get on board Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet big brother project—biometric attendance system for babus. Never mind the fact that it is plagued by myriad issues like lack of registration and privacy for thousands of employees and several organisations still out of its loop, including the Prime Minister’s Office.
On Thursday, secretary (information technology) R S Sharma sent a letter to all the 150-odd secretaries in Delhi after a review of the attendance system was done in the Prime Minister’s office a day earlier. “It was noted that all the employees of the ministries/departments have so far not registered and the number of employees marking their attendance is also only about 50 per cent,” Sharma said.
The letter then conveyed the decision of the “meeting in PMO” that all employees should register and start marking their attendance “immediately”. “The expectation is 100 per cent enrolment of employees and all employees present should mark attendance. This should be ensured as early as possible, in any case before October 25, 2014,” said Sharma’s signed missive.
The letter annexed the statistics of attendance compiled for the day (October 8), which demonstrated the uphill task—only 48 per cent of employees had marked attendance, that is, 24,107 out of 49,505 registered employees among 146 ministries and departments. The situation becomes starker when comparing the number of people who mark their attendance with the total estimated employees—just 36 per cent.
However, the listed ministries did not include the Prime Minister’s office itself—nor was it also included in the website for the project. The system had been softly launched over a month ago, when ministries and departments were asked to install the new fingerprint devices. These are all linked to Unique Identification Authority of India’s servers with the Aadhar biometric information used to verify the registrants. Incidentally, Sharma had been UIDAI director general for five years.
Finally, all the information is filtered through the website, attendance.gov.in, which displays real-time information on the attendance status in government offices. However, the main web portal which showcases the attendance seems to have been done in a hurry.
A 28-year-old IT engineer, Shirsendu Karmakar went behind the scenes, so to say, to check the coding of attendance.gov.in after it went on hanging his computer.
“I had visited the site after I read a lot of praise about it online. But, what I saw in the coding was rather shocking. It showed that it was done in a hurry and by inexperience people,” said Karmakar, who blogged about the drawbacks in the code.
Interestingly, one of the most controversial aspects of the attendance system, which created a lot of heartburn among bureaucrats, has been veiled from the public. Till Thursday, any visitor could find out the entry and exit timing of an official by name, the last four numbers of their mobile and their performance over a certain range of date. But, a visit on Friday showed that the earlier transparency was gone – and now the only status accessible was whether a specific government official was “active” or “inactive”.
“There was really no need to know for the general public to know by individual officer the incoming and outgoing time. This should be basically only revealed to the head of department,” said a senior government official. On Friday, the external affairs ministry was the best-performing among all the central government offices in Delhi—largest number of 1,483 employees marked their attendance. They were followed by the national informatics centre and the department of agriculture and cooperation.
At the same time, there were 12 departments and ministries which showed ‘zero’ attendance. The most notable was the ministry of railways, as well as several departments of the defence ministry, including Defence Research and Development Organisation. The National Investigative Agency, under MHA, also showed no attendance. According to sources, there were objections from MHA on security grounds, as no WiFi system is allowed inside North Block. Most of the ministries have also said that the slow process of registration was due to the fact that officers were still in the process of getting an Aadhar card.
It remains to be seen if marking attendance actually translates into good governance.