Manav Sampada, an ambitious programme of the State Government to keep digital records of all its employees under Human Resource Management System (HRMS) is facing hiccups that any programme running on ‘Trial and Error’ theory of learning could probably face. According to the officials and employees from a number of departments, the poor Internet speed in the State combined with software related issues has left this programme destined to miss its deadline.
It is only as recently as May that authorities directed DCs of all the districts to stop payment of salaries to those employees, who have failed to register their records on the prescribed website despite repeated reminders from respective departments, and also from Department of Personnel in particular. According to the officials, payments of many employees in a couple of districts including Garhwa have been kept on hold.
“Though there are a number of other reasons also, Internet speed is the biggest hurdle in the way of this programme. Even many of other reasons are also directly or indirectly associated with Internet speed and software related issues itself,” said a Deputy Secretary of Personnel, Administrative Reforms and Rajbhasha Department who has been given fair amount of responsibility to make this programme meet its deadline.
“This programme is based on software developed by National Informatics Centre (NIC), Government of India. And we have to look at and remain dependent on them in case of any and every difficulty that comes across in software,” the official said.
The problem is going to increase, as Department Secretary Nidhi Khare has directed the employees enrolled on this platform to send their leave and other applications, if any, through this platform itself. There are around 1.65 lakh Government employees in the State from 44 departments in all, whose records were to be kept under Manav Sampada. “I can say that it is our achievement that we have been successful to have data of some 1.35 lakh employees on this platform so far. If hurdles removed from the beginning, we could have easily succeeded to make it a deadline meeting project,” said the official.
Focusing more on the hurdles, Special Secretary of IT and e-Governance Department Dr Sarvesh Singhal said, “The programme was first tried and tested in Himachal Pradesh in 2013. But Himachal Pradesh has employee strength of not more than 30 thousand, whereas ours is more than five times larger than that. Secondly, there were either a number of columns or boxes of information which we required here in Jharkhand and it was not available in original software, or which existed there and we didn’t require it.”
Singhal said, “The fact is that the number of customisation in the software that we had to make according to our requirements has crossed 350 mark so far, and we still have a number of customisations pending. This is why this programme which was started in February 2014, took little over one year just to take off.”
The Government had fixed a deadline of 2 years and 8 months to complete the project, which is just three months away from now. “Getting all into it by that time is not a big deal. The issue will be verifying it, as we have noticed that around half of the forms that we have got locked in the website by now are incomplete in one way or the other,” a Personnel Department official said.