MADURAI, August 14, 2015
High Court introduces biometric attendance system for staff
- SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
Photo: R. Ashok
Justice R. Sudhakar, Administrative Judge of the Madras High Court Bench in Madurai, inaugurating the bio-metric attendance system in Madurai on Thursday.
A court officer said that the earlier system of signing attendance registers had its own flaws since some of the Office Assistants used to take away the registers from the respective departments five to 10 minutes before the designated time thereby leading to lot of heartburns among the staff.
The Madras High Court Bench here on Thursday introduced Biometric Attendance System (BAS) for its staff in order to avoid complaints of the age old system of signing attendance registers, placed in respective departments, causing several inconveniences to its employees.
Justice R. Sudhakar, the administrative judge of the Bench, inaugurated BAS in the presence of Registrar (Administration) M. Sreenivasan and Registrar (Judicial) S. Srinivasan and a huge number of court staff who expressed happiness over the introduction of the new system, expected to be foolproof.
A court officer said that the earlier system of signing attendance registers had its own flaws since some of the Office Assistants used to take away the registers from the respective departments five to 10 minutes before the designated time thereby leading to lot of heartburns among the staff. “We will have to lose half a day’s salary if we come late for more than two days in a month.
When such stringent conditions are imposed to ensure punctuality, it is always better to leave it to machines to keep a watch on the exact time when an employee reports for duty,” he said.
However, a court attender said that it would be better if the court administration makes use of BAS both for recording the time at which the employees report for duty as well as the time when they leave home instead of the present system of using it to record the time of entry alone. “Many employees attached to the judges work beyond eight hours a day. If a particular judge comes to court by 9 a.m. itself, then we also have to be here by that time and if a judge leaves the chamber only by 9 p.m. after completing dictation work, then we also have to stay back.
Therefore, it would be nice if our time of exit is also recorded and we are paid some overtime allowance,” he added.