Indian Police District Adopts Biometric Time and Attendance for Staff

With Aadhaar leading the way, biometric time and attendance tracking continues its spread through India’s public sector. The district police office (DPO) of Virudhunagar state has announced that it has now implemented such a system for its own ministerial staff.

It’s a move aimed at improving administrative efficiency and preventing potential timesheet fraud. Commenting on its deployment to The Hindu, Virudhunagar Superintendent of Police P. Aravindhan said that administration via the old system took “a lot of time”, while “with the new system, the attendance is automatically stored in the computer within seconds past 10 a.m. every day.” He added that it also prevents workers from leaving the office before their designated daily end times.

While the system applies only to the ministerial workers at the DPO, since only they work on a regular daily schedule, it’s yet another instance of time and attendance tracking bringing further accountability to government workers and the public sector in general. This trend has been initiated from the top down, largely via the central government’s implementation of biometric tracking through its Aadhaar biometric citizen registry; and while it has proven controversial in some deployments, it also appears to be increasingly popular, and may soon become pervasive in the private sector too.

Source: The Hindu

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January 5, 2016 – by Alex Perala