12 baje tak late nahi, 2 baje ke baad bhent nahi, goes an old adage for the Government employees, particularly for the Secretariat staff since old Bihar days.
However, the “unofficial hour”, maintained by the Secretariat staff so far is now official, thanks to Aadhar enabled biometric attendance system introduced by the State Government from January 1. Despite increased working hours for the Government offices and introduction of Biometric attendance device at the secretarial buildings after the Government introduced five day-norm on this New Year, average working hours of secretarial staffs remains the same while working days were decreased.
A similar move had been made in the year 2006-2007 but it could not be continued due to the late arrival of officials to their respective offices. Average in timing of all the staff on Friday was recorded as 13:35 pm while average out timing was registered as 18:00 pm with an effective working hours not more than five hours. The official working hours has been notified as10 am to 6 pm. The officials blame it on the shortage of machines, which people will take time to get acquainted with.
“The application is being developed which is bound to face the initial hiccups as most of the employees are not used to such devices taking much-much longer time which, they are expected to take to register their attendance in the biometric device,” said Special Secretary of IT department Praveen Kumar Jha.
Jha however, admitted that there are some people who are actually late comers but the delay in registering their attendance is due to lack of battery backup, UPS breakdown, power failure or non availability of trained persons for the job which will be overcome soon. Besides, there is acute shortage of biometric tabs also which will be increased soon. “The number of devices as compared to the number of people registering their attendance is very low, more devices are being installed and within a week’s time, it will start functioning properly,” he added.
The Principal Secretary of personnel department also attributed insufficient tabs as a reason for the delayed average attendance of the employees. “As soon as the sufficient number of tabs is installed at all the places, all deficiencies will be removed,” said Principal Secretary of Personnel Department SK Satpathy. According to Satpathy, it will take at least one week’s time to work the system efficiently.
As one tab is to be installed for 60 employees to registering their attendance, more than 108 tabs are required to cater them while there are only 56 functional tabs out of a total of 64 devices installed for the purpose. The government during a cabinet meeting on November 22 decided to re-introduce five-working day norms to reduce cost incurring on establishment.
Thanks to Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance System (AEBAS) which enables to keep a tab on the attendance of all the employees of the state government. Daily attendance of each individual employee has also been made available on the site http://aadhaar.jharkhand.gov.in:8008 from where any information related to an employee’s leave or attendance could be obtained. An employee can also register himself on the site and keep a tab on his leaves and status of attendance sitting at his home. Attendance of 2857 employees was recorded out of 3305