Is a babu at work? You can check in real time...tech

Oct 08 2014 : The Times of India (Jaipur) Kim Arora New Delhi:   Tracking the attendance of ministers and babus from central government departments and ministries in real-time is possible now . The recently launched government website, attendance.gov .in, shows attendance details of nearly 50,000 employees across 148 organisations (data as of Tuesday afternoon), and the figures are expected to grow .The website and the system architecture have been developed by a team from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) under the direction of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY).The website is in its trial phase, and will soon be launched formally . The data indicates not only whether a particular officer is present or not, but also the time she signed in and out, the number of entries on each biometric machine installed in an office and whether it is active or inactive. The home page of the website is a dashboard which features a real-time “attendance activity“ graph, number of employees authenticated and registered for the biometric attendance system and number of active devices among others. More detailed data shows individual employee timings, along with their pictures, e-mail addresses, and attendance timings. On an individual employee page, one can also see a monthlong graph indicating present days, holidays and days when the person was absent. For example, for Gulshan Rai, director general of Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) had an “in time“ of 09:26 am on Tuesday morning. The employees' biometric details are linked to UID or Aadhaar. The web portal is meant to act as a centralized management information system for attendance, and is currently active for Delhi offices. “The details are forwarded from the local server to the UIDAI for verification. Then, the attendance is recorded. The average response time for this process is currently 1.5 seconds,“ says R S Sharma, secretary at the DeitY , adding that they are seeing a “huge amount of discipline in the trial phase itself.“ Sharma was the principal Secretary of the science and technology department of the Jharkhand state government, where a similar attendance portal is in place at the state level. While several concerns regarding privacy have been raised in the past when it comes to the use and implementation of the UID or Aadhaar numbers, Sharma says the linking has helped bring down costs and has madthe project scaleable.