Telangana staff reports to work late

Hyderabad: Government employees of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana states are avoiding Aadhaar-enabled biometric attendance. The data collected by the biometric system revealed that employees in AP come to office earlier than in Telangana state. However, employees in Telangana government offices leave the office later in the evening. The average ‘in’ time in AP is 9.40 am and in TS it is 10.27 am. The average ‘out’ time in AP is 5.13 pm while it is 5.43 pm in Telangana state, an analysis of the data from the biometric attendance system revealed.

The average attendance in the past 30 days over the biometric system showed 33 per cent in AP. Kadapa and Guntur were worst performers as far as attendance was concerned. The performance of staff in AP Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu’s home district Chittoor was not bad. So far, 87,539 employees from 321 organisations have signed up for the Aadhaar-enabled biometric attendance system. These organisations include area hospitals, universities and government departments.

Interestingly in the base report of the Aadhaar-enabled attendance system maintained at the Central level, only 38,367 employees were shown as being present for work this Tuesday. In Telangana, where 18,420 employees are registered, the system showed 2,194 are present for work on Tuesday. A senior official of the Unique Identification Authority of India said the attendance system with real-time monitoring used a lightweight system and did not require any hardware or algorithm.

“It takes one to two seconds to record attendance with a wi-fi connection or 8 to 11 seconds using a GPRS SIM,” he said. The officer said the attendance request originates from the system and goes to a centralised server with fingerprint and user ID. It is sent to the Aadhaar authentication service where, upon being authenticated, the attendance record is stored on the server.

Explaining the case of absentees, an official of the state government said the server was failing sometimes due to connectivity problems. This was resulting in less attendance being recorded. Though Jharkand was the first state to implement this, the Andhra Pradesh government had  picked ahead of Telangana state, said an official of the AP government. In Telangana state, employees of  73 organisations are recorded and 187 devices are functional. In Andhra Pradesh 2,714 biometric devices are active, the official said.