For everyone who has called on a BBMP official only to find that he’s on ‘field duty’, this is good news. And here’s one more use for the Aadhaar card. If all goes according to plan, the public will soon be able to access information regarding the attendance of Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) officials.
This comes in the wake of the Administrative Standing Committee Chairman accusing BBMP officials of working just 3 to 4 hours a day. He wants an Aadhaar-linked bio-metric attendance system.
CR Lakshminarayana, Chairman, Administration and Reforms Committee of the BBMP recently revealed that officials had not been regular to the office and he had received several complaints from the public about officials not being accessible during office hours.
In a bid to ensure that officials report to work and stay at their desks, the chairman has proposed to introduce Aadhaar-linked bio-metric attendance for all the officials of the BBMP.
With this, the public can access the attendance of officials online and monitor their real-time availability in their chambers or departments, so that the public can plan their visits to meet these officials.
CCTV surveillance at officials’ chambers has been proposed to monitor the movements of officials. Said CR Lakshminarayana, “While the BBMP has introduced bio-metric attendance for pourakarmikas and it’s very strict to mark them absent if they miss marking attendance, there have been many complaints against the BBMP officials for not attending office regularly or in time. Also, I have observed that the officials have been working for just 4 to 5 hours a day. I want to propose an Aadhaar-linked bio-metric system so that the attendance of officials can be maintained and monitored effectively.”
Speaking about his proposal, he said, “Every day, thousands of people visit the BBMP offices and they don’t know if an official they want to meet is available or not or what time he will be returning to his desk. To make BBMP more responsive to the public, I want to introduce this new system. I have written several letters in this matter and this time I am going to place this before the minister so that the work done by the BBMP will be effective.’’