NEW DELHI: India’s new right-wing government has begun an online trial run to register staff attendance records, seeking to tackle absenteeism among the country’s notoriously work-shy bureaucrats.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledged during his election campaign to crack the whip on civil servants, notorious for arriving late, taking long lunches or spending parts of their day on the golf course.
The new system will use fingerprints to ensure that workers have to physically turn up, and will not be able to clock in on each other’s behalf. “The basic principle behind this (project) is to ensure that there is no ghost worker,” a government official involved with the programme said yesterday on condition of anonymity.
“Everyone is equal under this new system, unlike before, when junior workers would mark attendance on a register but senior officers would not necessarily (do so),” she added.
The website, attendance.gov.in, is hooked up to special computers in government offices that will identify employees through their fingerprint and a unique identity number, a process that takes less than a second, according to the government official.AFP
