It’s amazing the pace at which new Government is bringing various Governance initiatives online. In a latest, the government employee live biometric attendance system (BAS) is now online and open to public. Attendance of nearly 50,000 government employees from 148 departments can be viewed online.
The biometric attendance system (BAS) is part of “Digital India” program and is currently implemented in the central government offices located in Delhi. Slowly, the BAS will be expanded to all central Government employees across India. BAS will be applicable to all ministries, departments, autonomous central govt bodies, institutions and Central public unit sectors as well.
In the first phase of implementation, Govt has installed 1000 wall mounted bio-metric attendance terminals, 5000 finger print scanning devices and 200 IRIS devices across various govt buildings. Because the attendance is now centralized, govt employees will be able to mark their attendance in any of the buildings where biometric terminals and scanners are installed.
On the portal itself, anyone can see the attendance activity over time, the total number of registered employees and the number of employees that are currently present. You can even see the number of active devices, and clicking on any of these tabs takes you to more granular information including the name of the employees, their division, their in-time and out time, their designation.
What’s more anyone can download the entire attendance data in form of excel spreadsheet on their computers and view it as well.
Biometric attendance uses UIDAI Database and it means that an employee has to be present by himself, if they are to be marked as present into the system. For employee registration, they are verified through Aadhaar cards and are also given a unique 6 digit identification number.
Here is how verification of employee takes place on BAS.
An overview document uploaded on the portal reads, “Aadhaar based biometric Authentication for the purpose of attendance would ensure that the attendance of all the Government employees will be visible in real time on the common attendance portal ensuring transparency and accountability to bring efficiency.”
What is really amazing about this online system is that it updates in real time. For example, at the time of writing this, 23,323 employees were present out of total 32,586 verified employees. A total of 1468 desktop devices were active out of total 2420.
The granularity of information available on the portal is quite surprising and shows an honest effort from Government to bring the attendance system online. Even the look and feel of the website is absolutely top notch!
Do visit the Live Attendance portal and check out for yourself. Kudos to the government for coming up with such a good attendance system. Guess, it is time to show the world how it is really done!
Hey Arun Prabhudesai, i have question about online BAS, Can i connect a single machine with two different portals at same time?
It is a good step forward. I really like this transparency in India. We need to make sure that this system works and does not go out of order or tampered by the employees. We do not want to embarrass the employee but in the future we need to develop a system where the complaints against a public servant (bribe or unfair demands) is registered and it could be accessed by the public as well as the Govt. system for appropriate rectification.
Staff are capable of tampering with the system. Hence, it is necessary to track the office where these systems are going out of order and how often. The head of the office should be made responsible to ensure that these systems are not tampered with. It is advised to have a standby system for the quick change over in case of any fault.
there should also be online complain system for public, against the officer(s) who come late or on being absent from duty.
Its Amazing Idea by Indian Government..Its better to implement the same procedure in state Govt. offices..