As part of the Digital India campaign, the Centre has launched an Aadhaar-based system developed by the National Informatics Center (NIC) to track attendance of Government employees.
The new system, www.attendance.gov.in, aims to ensure that the attendance of all Government employees will be visible in real time on the common attendance portal, ensuring transparency and accountability. An employee will have to register his/her attendance through a biometric (fingerprint or Iris) system, which will be authenticated online by doing a one-to-one match with the biometric stored in the UIDAI database against the employee’s Aadhaar number. The new system will be implemented in two phases.
In the first phase, 148 Central Government organisations (Ministry, departments and autonomous bodies etc) are on board with registration of 49,272 employees. To enable these employees to register their attendance, 1,000 wall-mounted biometric attendance terminals, 5,000 fingerprint scanning devices and 200 Iris devices have been procured and are being installed in about 100 Government bhawans/buildings.
In the second phase, all the Central Government organisations would use the common biometric attendance portal, which is hosted at the NIC data centre. Various Government organisations are operating across different locations. The major challenge is to enable and manage the attendance of across various locations keeping the total cost of ownership (TCO) low.
At present, various Government organisations have deployed proprietary biometric attendance solutions, which lack uniformity in technical architecture due to which these solutions are difficult to scale up and integrate. All departments will have a nodal officer for the new system. Then, there will be online registration of all employees. There will be two steps of verification.
First, the Aadhaar details will be verified by the UIDAI, while the nodal officer will do the second verification. Only after that will an employee be able to mark his/her attendance on the biometric terminal.
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