Technology cannot out-wit recalcitrance

SUBASH RAI
GANGTOK, 28 April: Following a Government circular issued some years back, a majority of the head offices of Government departments are now equipped with Biometric Time Attendance gadgets.
As an outcome, punctuality has noticeably improved among the employees, but that, of course, is not the same as an improved work culture. What has also been noticed is that in the absence of proper monitoring and stock-taking, these gadgets have become more about posing potential disciplinary scrutiny than actually delivering it.
Speaking to NOW!, a senior official of the Home Department, commented that without proper monitoring, this gadget was useless.

“The manual attendance registers used earlier suffered the same limitation. If an official was assigned for exclusive monitoring of attendance, then discipline was better. If this monitoring is not regular, the data recorded in this digital gadget is of no use if it is not collected and collated on regular basis,” the official observed.
Also, this is after all a machine, and machines malfunction… quite often. What is more, even in sections where biometric time attendance devices have been installed, the fingerprints of some employees have still not been registered with the gadget’s central processing unit.
“We were compelled to revert to manual attendance registers when the device stopped functioning and also because attendance of employees not still registered in the machine had to be maintained separately anyway,” the official said.
The gadgets were installed at costs ranging between Rs. 35,000 to Rs. 40,000 per gadget superseding the manual attendance procedure, which was easier to doctor.
A senior official of the Department of Information Technology, which installed the gadget a couple of months back said, “Though the attendance of the employees in our office was already quiet punctual, the data received from the device has made easier to evaluate the sincerity of our employees.”
On the hand, some senior officials believe that the new devise has actually made it easier for the employees to bunk office during working hours.
“One can register entry at around 10 a.m. in the morning and then leave the office for the whole day. At around 4 pm s/he can return and again register as leaving the office as per the office time,” he said.
A senior official of a Department said, “Actually, Government employees should not need timings. Out of the six-hour official working hours, if an employee sincerely dedicates three hours to work assigned to him, all these extra efforts of the Government to tame its employees will not be required.”
The technical part of the gadget is that the software uses biometric fingerprint identification of the registered employee to track the time of each employee’s presence, automatically calculates a summary time for each employee and generates printable reports. Further, the concerned official assigned with the task of monitoring can easily access to the archival attendance history of the employees.
However, the outcome of the gadgets, installed in the various departments, will take some more time to give fruitful results, unless the Government employees realize that it is their duty to improve their work culture by utilizing the assigned timing for the benefit of the State and also to the people as whole.