Announced just a few weeks ago, the Indian government's new
online biometric attendance system is now online, with nearly 50,000 employees
attendance across 147 government organisations (at the time of writing)
including the Cabinet Secretariat, and other government bodies like the Central
Vigilance Commission and the Planning Commission.
On the website the attendance of employees can be tracked
online - this serves as a centralised management system for the government, but
it should also increase transparency as anyone can access the site for a broad
overview.
On the site, you can see the attendance activity over time,
the number of registered employees and the number of employees present today.
You can even see the number of active devices, and clicking on any of these
tabs takes you to a spreadsheet where you can see a breakdown of the
information.
In this way, for example, you can see that the Ministry of
External Affairs has 195 devices, and at the time of writing, 159 are active.
You can see that eight out of 34 biometric terminals are currently inactive,
and that 1,358 MEA employees have marked their attendance today. Click the
detail button on the right, and you can see the breakup between the Jawaharlal
Nehru Bhawan, South Block and Patiala House offices of the MEA. Clicking detail
on this page shows you the device ID, the type of device (tablet or desktop)
and even which gate the employee entered the building from.
Further details include the name of the employee,
designation, division and the exact time the employee arrived for duty. You can
even use the search function on the dashboard to find an individual employee -
and his or her email id. That's an incredibly detailed system, and you can use
the export button to download the data on your screen to an Excel sheet as
well.
The website shows a dashboard you can track this
information, but this goes beyond just transparency. Government employees will
be able to mark their attendance at any Central Office, which is also useful
for tracking movement. This is done using biometric reading devices in the
offices, and uses the Aadhaar to verify the data. Each government organisation
has to enrol itself for the system to work, and on the dashboard, you can see
that of the 49,141 employees registered so far, 32,487 have been verified.
As noted in the FAQ section of the website, the system
relies on network connectivity at all times, and for this reason, the
government will be ensuring Wi-Fi connectivity on NICNET, and SIM-based
connectivity for employees using tablets.
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