Clearly in no mood to offer any let up in
getting government officials to turn up for work in time, the Narendra Modi
government is all set to install iris scanners alongside fingerprint reading
machines in many central government offices just to ensure that no employee is
left out of the purview of the Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance System
(AEBAS).
The move, government officials said, is
essentially aimed at ensuring that no government employee escapes marking
attendance on the AEBAS just in case some of the wall mounted bio-metric
attendance terminals are unable to read their fingerprints. Officials said
there had been a some isolated cases where a few of these machines had reported
glitches in recognising fingerprints of registered employees.
Since the electronic attendance system has
already been linked to Aadhaar, the fingerprints of employees are authenticated
online by matching them with the biometrics stored in the UIDAI database
against the employees’ Aadhaar number. “Since a scan of the iris is also a part
of the biometric data captured by UID to generate the Aadhaar number, iris
scans can also be used to mark attendance using the AEBAS,” an official
explained.
Sources said that around 200 iris scanning
devices are already under installation in around 100 government building in the
national capital. “The installation of these scanners will further strengthen
the AEBAS,” an official said. Over 87,000 government employees, from 395
organisations, have registered for the AEBAS so far. Close to 5,000 fingerprint
reading devices — including biometric terminals and desktop devices — have been
installed in central government offices.
Simultaneously, efforts are on to synchronise
all the wall mounted bio-metric attendance terminals installed in government
buildings in the capital to enable users the flexibility to mark their “out”
attendance from a terminal that may not necessarily be installed in their own
respective office buildings.
“Often, officers and employees are required to
go to other government offices located in buildings other than the ones where
their own offices are. This leads to a situation where many of these employees
are forced to come back late evening to their own offices just to mark their
attendance. To tackle this, the wall mounted bio-metric attendance terminal are
being synchronised so that an employee from say Shastri Bhavan may be able to
mark his “out” attendance from say Rail Bhavan,” an official said.
Source : An article by Mr Raghabendra Rao inIndian Express
