Implementation of Biometric attendance system at Government offices became a tough task for Personnel department as most of tabs installed in a hurry created annoyance among the Government officials as they had to wait for hours to mark their attendance on Wednesday.
The installers, however, claimed that these were initial hiccups due to lack of trained people for the job and that would be removed in a day or two. “There is no any problem in the system but there has to be someone for monitoring who will check whether the machine is working or not,” said a resource person appointed for the job. These machines need to be monitored regularly by someone, he added.
The maintenance work of these machines will be taken care by Jharnet and UIDAI, while computer operators of concerned departments have been trained for now and asked to look after these machines. Earlier, Biometric tabs at various departments were installed on trial basis at some of the secretarial buildings at the state head quarters. Though it was functional on trial basis for the last two months, it is strictly being followed from January this year.
Employees have to stand in long queues to mark their attendance at the only functional biometric attendance recorder in Nepal House on Wednesday. “They were also found to be cursing the system while standing on the queues on Thursday also as it took a long time to mark their attendance,” said an employee.
“As it takes 30 seconds for a person on an average to mark our attendance, just imaging how long it will take for all of 15 staff in our department,” said an employee working at the FFT building. As one cannot avoid his senior officers, a junior level staff has to keep on standing in the queue for over an hour to mark his attendance despite coming early at the office, he said. Though, 60 employees, on an average, have to be catered by each tab but to start with, each department in the secretariat have been allotted a single tab which will be increased depending upon its strength.
As of now, 51 machines have been installed at the secretarial officers at Project building, Nepal house, FFP and MDM buildings along with some other extended offices for the employees of all departments. Home and Finance department has maximum of 140 employees. Despite arriving early of the office timing the employees at Nepal House secretariat resorted to protests when many of them could not record their attendance till lunch hour and were still in the queue to record their thumb impression.