Government Employees at Work and on Time? The Website is Live

Announced just a few weeks ago, the Indian government's new online biometric attendance system is now online, with nearly 50,000 employees attendance across 147 government organisations (at the time of writing) including the Cabinet Secretariat, and other government bodies like the Central Vigilance Commission and the Planning Commission.

On the website the attendance of employees can be tracked online - this serves as a centralised management system for the government, but it should also increase transparency as anyone can access the site for a broad overview.

On the site, you can see the attendance activity over time, the number of registered employees and the number of employees present today. You can even see the number of active devices, and clicking on any of these tabs takes you to a spreadsheet where you can see a breakdown of the information.

In this way, for example, you can see that the Ministry of External Affairs has 195 devices, and at the time of writing, 159 are active. You can see that eight out of 34 biometric terminals are currently inactive, and that 1,358 MEA employees have marked their attendance today. Click the detail button on the right, and you can see the breakup between the Jawaharlal Nehru Bhawan, South Block and Patiala House offices of the MEA. Clicking detail on this page shows you the device ID, the type of device (tablet or desktop) and even which gate the employee entered the building from.

Further details include the name of the employee, designation, division and the exact time the employee arrived for duty. You can even use the search function on the dashboard to find an individual employee - and his or her email id. That's an incredibly detailed system, and you can use the export button to download the data on your screen to an Excel sheet as well.

The website shows a dashboard you can track this information, but this goes beyond just transparency. Government employees will be able to mark their attendance at any Central Office, which is also useful for tracking movement. This is done using biometric reading devices in the offices, and uses the Aadhaar to verify the data. Each government organisation has to enrol itself for the system to work, and on the dashboard, you can see that of the 49,141 employees registered so far, 32,487 have been verified.

As noted in the FAQ section of the website, the system relies on network connectivity at all times, and for this reason, the government will be ensuring Wi-Fi connectivity on NICNET, and SIM-based connectivity for employees using tablets.