Late comers, beware! The world is watching you
Apr 28, 2022
Story
Biometric
Late comers, beware! The world is watching you
Late comers, beware! The world is watching you
Aiming at making officials accountable and improving the work environment in its departments, the Narendra Modi-led NDA Government at the Centre has introduced a biometric attendance marker system and simultaneously launched a website which enables both the Government and the common man to keep track of the presence of public servants. The move has evoked a mixed reaction among employees with one section viewing it as a step towards “acche din”, while the other section terming it a “breach of privacy”. Bureaucracy Today visits various Government offices in New Delhi to get a live experience of the Biometric System and brings to its readers a special report from the ground.
By Shalini Singh and Muhammad Zulqarnain Zulfi
Long queues, puzzled faces and irritating expressions of officials caught Bureaucracy Today’s attention as we entered the Agriculture Ministry office premises in a pleasant evening. “Today, I got late by half-an-hour, so I have to punch out at 6:00 pm instead of 5:30 pm,” said an irritated female employee while desperately gazing at her watch.
She was not alone. The Bureaucracy Today team received similar reactions from several employees in almost all the offices it visited.
BUREAUCRACYTODAYPOLL SAYS IT ALL
MIXED REACTIONS
The new system will use fingerprints to ensure that government employees physically turn up and are not able to clock in on each other’s behalf. There was a mixed reaction when Bureaucracy Today spoke to officials across departments.
An officer who does not want to reveal his name and department tells Bureaucracy Today, “This system will bring equality in government departments unlike before when junior workers would mark their attendance on a diary but senior officers would avoid it.”
Hoping that the move would usher in “acche din”, an officer from the Department of Power opines, “The Prime Minister’s toughness towards bureaucrats was clearly visible when he asked for a list of officials who were regular tee-times at golf courses and also kept tabs on who was meeting whom in a hotel club. The introduction of biometric system is a good step which will eventually bring good governance.”
Echoing his voice, an employee at Krishi Bhawan which houses many ministries, makes a startling revelation to Bureaucracy Today, “In Krishi Bhawan, a junior clerk did not attend office for almost five years but his attendance was marked in the register every single day. It might sound strange but this was a regular practice in most of the ministries until the new attendance system was introduced.”
Sanjay R Bhoosreddy, Joint Secretary, Animal Husbandry, Dairying and Fisheries Department, remarks, “The Biometric attendance system has boosted the performance of the employees.”
However, there are scores of officials who think otherwise. “If the Government wants to bring such strictness then it should also give rewards and recognition to the deserving officers and also introduce a system of evaluating performance for promotions,” a senior bureaucrat argues.
Sharing his views with Bureaucracy Today, a senior level bureaucrat on condition of anonymity says, “Though the Government has taken well-crafted measures to ensure result-oriented reform, there is a flip side too. The Biometric Attendance System has made us bound to schedules. We have to log out by the stipulated working hours. During crisis I used to request my staff members to work overtime to meet the deadline but now that’s not possible.”
The officer suggests that there should be spy cameras to monitor if the employees are working in the stipulated time or just waiting for the time to get over. “I have personally noticed many times that employees wait in the office corridors for their time period to get over so that they can log out and escape compensation. I cannot do anything as I don’t have any such technical aid to monitor their activities,” he rues.
Sharing similar views, Vinod Dubey, a senior clerk in Udyog Bhawan, says, “In my 25 years of service, I never left for my home before 8 pm. I always extended my cooperation and support to my co-workers and seniors whenever required. Now that’s not possible as it’s compulsory for me to abide by BAS rules. Hence I am helpless.”
A female employee who happens to be in a rush to logout in the Finance Ministry says, “Though the new Biometric machines based on the Aadhaar system provide us flexibility to ‘log in’ or ‘log out’ from any Government office, its permutation and combination is very annoying.” According to the website (http://attendance.gov.in/), the average response time is 1.36 seconds.
Another major issue which the employees face is that of ‘logging out’. P K Mishra, an employee in Krishi Bhawan, says: “At times, like during the recent Parliamentary sessions, we have to work beyond midnight and the machine changes the calendar which means we have skipped our log out process. So when we punch beyond midnight we ‘log in’ instead of ‘log off’.”
Taking note of all these grievances, Bhoosreddy, who is also the Secretary of the All India IAS Officers Association, tells Bureaucracy Today, “The process has just begun. Though the roadmap is fully complete, registration and authorization take time.”
Elaborating on the fact Ram Kumar Diwedi, a junior level employee in Krishi Bhawan, says, “Old machines were installed in the complex in the year 2012 for certain departments like those of Rural Development, Food and Animal Husbandry.” These machines had a very limited database. They were monitored by the concerned department only. As such they were faster. On the other hand, the new Aadhaar-based biometric machines have the database of all the registered employees. Hence the process will take time.”
GLOBAL MEDIA REACTS POSITIVELY
Robin Pagnamenta, South Asia Editor of The Times, while speaking to Bureaucracy Today says, “It’s a positive change being brought in the Indian bureaucracy. Due to policy paralysis brought in by the previous UPA Government the Indian bureaucracy was in crisis. But the new Government is making strenuous efforts to bring the Indian bureaucracy on track. This step will bring efficiency and good governance in government departments unlike before when one could only see government servants hindering around. This step could also result in delivering services and clearing various project files on time. The new Government is definitely working to bring in change and the entire world is taking an account of the change being introduced in India .”
Douglas Busvine, Bureau Chief of the Reuters news agency office in New Delhi, tells Bureaucracy Today, “This initiative has drawn a lot of international attention because it shows just how far Prime Minister Modi is prepared to go to get his bureaucrats working for him. Although there are concerns that Modi is resorting to intrusive ‘Big Brother’ methods, some investors say the electronic tracking will improve Government efficiency. And that, they say, is bullish for India.”
THE BRAIN BEHIND
THE BRAIN BEHIND
RS Sharma, Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology, is to be credited with building the much-talked about attendance system for India’s Central Government employees that is inexpensive and publicly available on the Internet.
In an exclusive interview to Bureaucracy Today, Sharma says, “The technology is inexpensive, robust and scalable. It requires only mobile (GPRS) connectivity and Aadhaar numbers of those participating in the system. Hence, it is possible to extend this system to any office/place where you have mobile connectivity. This can include Government offices, schools, health centres, Anganwaadis and MDM centres. At the minimum, this can be thought of as a system which replaces the manual registers used for recording attendance with the digital registers allowing analytics and digital processing of data for decision-making. Other advantages may include improvement in the efficiency of the system and reduction of leakages (such as in MDM).”
As the new system removes the association of the devices with employees, an employee can mark attendance at any device anywhere in the system – irrespective of the department/offices. Illustrating the point, Sharma explains, “If a Government of India office is located in Mumbai and an officer goes there from Delhi, it will be possible for him to mark his attendance from Mumbai exactly in the same way as he was doing it in Delhi. The system captures and displays real-time data on a dashboard. Data is generated as a result of activities and is not an activity itself, which is the case in many applications.”
Talking about his journey in making the new attendance system a reality, Sharma says, “Before joining as Chief Secretary of Jharkhand in April 2013, I was working as DG and Mission Director of UIDAI, the Authority which is responsible for providing Aadhaar numbers to the residents of India. The Aadhaar has two important properties – uniqueness and online authentication capability. While uniqueness is fairly well understood, authentication and its usages have not been appreciated as much.”
He further says, “At the UIDAI, we started testing the authentication service in various scenarios. We put it in place in Jharkhand for recording the attendance of employees in the Secretariat. There were serious problems of absenteeism and late arrivals and early departures which created disincentive for those employees who were sincere and punctual besides a poor work culture. After we put this system in place, there was visible improvement in the punctuality of employees. The attendance system has resulted in changing the six-day week to a five-day week in the Jharkhand Secretariat. Now the State Government has decided to extend this system in the district and block offices also. This is also progressively being extended to schools and hospitals in mufassil areas. Minimum requirements of infrastructure and connectivity at the front-end make this system highly scalable and easy to roll out.”
HUGE POTENTIAL
Aadhaar authentication has huge potential in eGovernance applications. Any area which requires ‘proof of presence’ can use it. Banking, electronic service delivery, PDS, checking proxies and attendance are some of the areas where it can be effectively used.
The authentication devices can be in any form (mobile phone, tablets or PCs). The devices can perform authentication as long as they follow open standards set by the UIDAI. The communication mode can be anything ranging from broad-band to simple GPRS. The time taken for authentication is as small as a couple of seconds and the UIDAI provides this service free of cost as a public utility to make this a very promising area of application development.
The authentication devices can be in any form (mobile phone, tablets or PCs). The devices can perform authentication as long as they follow open standards set by the UIDAI. The communication mode can be anything ranging from broad-band to simple GPRS. The time taken for authentication is as small as a couple of seconds and the UIDAI provides this service free of cost as a public utility to make this a very promising area of application development.
Talking about the Central Government’s decision to launch the system for its offices located in Delhi, he says, “The system has been running on trial since October 1, 2014. The software for the entire system has been developed on an open-source stack without any extra cost. The team which has completed both the server-side and client-side software consists of only three persons– two of whom did it in Ranchi. The only cost is the procurement and installation of devices at the front-end and their maintenance. This work is being done by the NIC.”
The current system has a completely different architecture from the earlier systems. Firstly, these systems had to have all the biometric related functions/features like registration, de-duplication, and matching and life-cycle management of biometrics of employees. Sharma explains, “This component (biometric) itself made those systems complex and costly. Secondly, the front-end devices were also more complex and costly. These were customized and part of the entire solution – supplied and maintained by the solution provider. This made the system closed, complex, costly, non-scalable and vendor-dependent – requiring high capital and maintenance cost.
These were also silo solutions. You also had the requirement to put your attendance on the devices assigned to you.”
These were also silo solutions. You also had the requirement to put your attendance on the devices assigned to you.”
VERY LIGHT WEIGHT SYSTEM
The new system leverages a common authentication infrastructure established by the UIDAI whose back-end has the capability of serving millions of authentication requests per hour. Sharma explains, “The response time for authentication request is sub-second. This makes the system very light weight. Secondly, the front-end devices are commodity devices like tablets, PCs and standard finger-print or IRIS sensors. Hence the system is based on open standards and open architecture which make it inter-operable and extendible and allows various makes and types of devices to be hooked on to this system. Lastly, the entire software-stack is an open source, making it very robust and inexpensive. If required, the system can accommodate the attendance of all the employees of government departments (millions of them) both at the State and Central levels located all across India! It will require these entities at various levels to procure and install the front-end devices and connect them to the back-end server of the Government of India. In fact, we are preparing an on-boarding document which will enable departments and offices of the Central Government to participate in the system.”
When asked if the system affects the privacy of a Government servant, Sharma replies, “The system does not capture or display any private information relating to any Government employee. The attendance records are documents which are RTI-able. The RTI Act itself envisages putting all RTI-able information on the websites of the departments. My view is that the attendance system is only a very small application (and probably a trivial one at that) of Aadhaar authentication. This is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There are a large number of situations and eGovernance applications in which Aadhaar authentication can be leveraged to the benefit of our citizens – significantly contributing to the Digital India vision of our Prime Minister.”
THE LAST WORD
The Government seems to be on the right path. There may be hiccups all along and it may take some time for public servants to adapt themselves to a system which will eventually streamline the work culture in Government offices.
FACEOFF
Sanjay R Bhoosreddy, Secretary, IAS Officers’ Association
Is the Biometric Attendance System serving the purpose?
The process has just only begun. Though the roadmap is fully complete, registration and authorization take time. The Biometric attendance has boosted the performance of the employees.
Bureaucracy Today has observed that some employees just wait for the clock to struck 6. Is there any regulation that an employee cannot leave the office before the time?
There is a guideline. An employee is ought to work for the stipulated time frame. The BAS is at the introductory stage. Once everything gets settled everything will be monitored.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is keeping a close eye on bureaucrats…
It is not about keeping an eye or something like that but the work culture which needs to be reformed. Most of the time the general public has an opinion that Government employees don’t work but actually things are otherwise. During parliamentary sessions public servants work day and night. The new Modi-led Government has definitely taken positive initiatives.
There were some big old Biometric Machines lying in the office corridors. It appears they were installed prior to the new Aadhaar-enabled Biometric Machines. Are they still functional? Some employees have the opinion that they were better.
As far as I remember the old machines were installed in Krishi Bhawan on February 25, 2013 for certain departments like those of Urban Development and Animal Husbandry. They are very much functional right now also. I am not a technical expert so I cannot go into technicalities but yes those were much easier to operate. The old machines have records of all the employees of a particular department but the new ones have a huge database. I suppose using the Aadhaar was the only best option available.
ATAGLANCE
• A common Biometric Attendance System (BAS) was officially introduced in all Central Government offices in Delhi on October 7, 2014.
• On the same day, the Union Government launched the website attendance.gov.in to monitor the attendance of its employees in real time.
• Under the BAS, employees are required to mark their attendance through biometric terminals. An employee enters his/her six-digit Attendance ID on the terminal and subsequently the system asks for fingerprint verification.
• The six-digit Attendance ID Number is generated on the basis of the last six or first six digits of the individual's Aadhaar number.
• Since network connectivity is essential for marking attendance, the Government is planning two types of connectivity with each attendance terminal – wi-fi on broadband and SIM-based GSM connectivity on tablets.
• So far, 149 Central Government organizations have opted for the Biometric Attendance System and 50,638 employees have registered for it. The implementation of the system is a work in progress and all employees are yet to adopt the system.
• On October 13, of the 50,650 Central Government employees registered with attendance.gov.in, only 27,857 were present. The remaining 22,793-odd employees had not turned up for duty for whatever the reason. Officials claim that the website is still in the process of updating and the results cannot be accurate.
