GHMC vigilance team finds 1,300 sanitary staff absent

Hyderabad: A day after vigilance raids on sanitary field assistants (SFAs), a difference of 1,300 was seen in the daily report, probably an indicator of the number of fake attendance marked every day.

The GHMC has decided to question sanitation workers, SFAs, and assistant medical officers of health (AMoH) for the reason behind the large number of absentees on Friday. GHMC vigilance teams intend to verify the fingerprints of each sanitation worker with the synthetic fingerprints recovered during the checks.

A vigilance official said that they had recovered 84 synthetic fingerprints and found 1,300 persons absent after accounting for weekly offs and leaves. The official said the department was seeing the large number of absentees as a part of the conspiracy and would investigate further. It would also purify the attendance list.

A senior GHMC official said a preliminary estimate prepared while introducing bio-attendance suggest that the corporation might save '110 crore by removing fake names from rolls. The recent discovery of synthetic fingerprints had shown that the corporation could be losing at least '150 crore annually.

The civic body spends '450 crore on salaries to outsourcing employees. If the GHMC scrutinises the names of all 2,626 sanitation groups, 18,382 contract workers, 305 sanitary jawans and 948 SFAs more irregularities would be brought to light, sources said.It was learnt that a similar case was registered with Nampally police station and one Gopala Srinivas, an SFA, was arrested with 21 synthetic fingerprints. Another SFA, Suresh, was trapped by the police in Madhapur.

Officers said senior assistant medical officers for health who were holding the same post for years were the masterminds.

The change from manual to bio-metric attendance has helped the GHMC remove duplicate names and stop fake attendance cases and it saved '60 crore in one year. But evidently the scam still persists.