Administrative setup in Jharkhand may have maintained pace with technological advancement but the State constabulary is terribly lagging behind in moving in sync with the former.
As babus and senior officials are being pushed to become punctual post installation of Aadhar based biometric system of attendance, the police personnel have been left off the hook.
None of the police stations have been equipped with the modern system of attendance which asks for thumb impression besides registration number and automatically records attendance upon verification of credentials of an employee. The men in Khakhi are still making their attendance through the oldest method known-manual form of attendance.
“No, there is no such (biometric) attendance system for us. We maintain attendance in sheets. The system is difficult to fit in our nature of job,” said Sergeant Major of Ranchi, TK Jha.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi might be emphasising on punctuality of officials but no discernible effort is being made for keeping track of duty-hours of police officials. The system although appears difficult to implement in police stations it carries a benefit in terms of tracking the number of hours a police personnel is on duty and could prove valuable in addressing stress related problems hence worthy for the police establishment.
“We are terribly understaffed. We are 24X7 on duty and there is no fixed time for us to report. But the system can be used for understanding why jawans sometimes behave so rudely,” said a police personnel on the condition of anonymity.
Incidentally, the Aadhar based biometric system was implemented in administrative units sinceApril 1 this year and so far has been limited to taming babus only.
Nonetheless the pace of seeding of employee code with Aadhar number has been extremely sluggish as the number of registered user has barely crossed 35,000. Notably, there around 2.8-lakh government officials including contractual workers in Jharkhand. The ambitious project is being implemented by around 294 across the state active devices that records attendance through scanners and tablets.
Notwithstanding the benefits of Aadhar based biometric attendance system Jharkhand police believes that the system is superfluous and impractical as of now. State police officials opine that the investment required is too much for a police station due to low number of staffs.
“There is no plan as such to implement the system in police stations,” said IG-Provision and Spokesperson of Jharkhand Police, Anurag Gupta adding, “there are very few police personnel in a police station. So it is not feasible to invest in a network for so small number of staffs”.
Meanwhile, with the transfer of the real brain behind the system-former Chief Secretary RS Sharma-the system is facing glitches which is testified by the low number of active users and even lower number of actual user of the improvised system of attendance. The number of active users as on September 29 is 13,546 whereas only 8000 people were shown present on the day.