Modi government's new portal to monitor employee attendance using Biometric Attendance System

The Modi government has launched a new initiative which will allow anyone to track the employee attendance numbers in government organisations. A new Biometric Attendance System (BAS) has been launched for government employees which will make use of the UIDAI’s Aadhar card and the attendance data will be visible on the portal attendance.gov.in [caption id=“attachment_236968” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  The dashboard of the Attendance.gov.in[/caption] The website gives a graphical representation of the attendance numbers in terms of employee registration, attendance activity according to time and authentication of the BAS devices. To start with a government organisation needs to be registered on the site, where in apart from the organisation details, the details of the concerned Nodal Officer also need to be filled in. At the time of writing, around 148 organisations had registered on the site, having around 49,000 plus registered employees. The home page dashboard gives us the number of organisations registered, registered employees, employees present today and active devices. It comes with a More Info button below each of these boxes which takes you to more detailed breakups of organisations and employees. [caption id=“attachment_236965” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  This table gives an overview of the number of employees present today in various registered organisations.[/caption] Aadhar card is necessary for the employee registrations in the BAS. The attendance ID of the employees will be generated by the Aadhar card numbers. The attendance ID will be verified only after the employee’s Aadhar information has been verified by UIDAI and activated by the Nodal Officer. [caption id=“attachment_236965” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  This table gives an overview of the number of employees present today in various registered organisations.[/caption] Post the organisation and employee registration, the employees will need to mark their attendance on the biometric sensors (for fingerprint verifications or iris scanning) which will be installed at these government organisations. According to the FAQ page, it will be possible for an employee to mark his or her attendance on any BAS terminal installed in any government building.“Yes, this will be possible as employee database for all central Government employees will be maintained centrally with a unique 6 digit id provided for every Government employee (based on the last 6 or first 6 digits of his/her Aadhaar number whichever is available in the system). The dashboard reports would be able show the location/building from where an employee has marked his attendance.” [caption id=“attachment_236963” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  Employee attendance details along with his designation, email ID, office location and so on[/caption] The government is relying on two types of connectivity options: Wi-fi on NICNET or broadband and SIM based GSM connectivity on tablets. There will be two main components to this: the front end system which will be the installed BAS terminals such as an Android tablet or a desktop PC having the client application which will prompt employees to provide biometric data via fingerprint or iris scans, which will be sent to the back end system. At the back end system there will be attendance servers which will be hosted in the NIC data centre with connectivity to UIDAI for real-time bio-metric authentication. From the four charts on the home page of attendance.gov.in, you will not only get an idea of the number of employees present, but also the number of active BAS devices installed in the government organisations. You can even export this data if you so wish. This is a good initiative which makes attendance in government organisations transparent with this online logging tool.