Biometric attendance system for civic workers in MCC soon

If everything goes as planned, then biometric attendance will be introduced to civic workers in Mangaluru City Corporation (MCC) within a month.

The city corporation has 219 permanent civic workers, 42 alternative civic workers, 623 civic workers working of Antony Waste Handling Cell Pvt Ltd and 22 of Unique Waste Processing Company Ltd.

Antony Waste Handling Cell Pvt Ltd is a contract agency for collecting and transporting all waste from the wards in the city to Pacchanady. The civic workers for Unique Waste Processing Company Ltd are engaged in processing solid waste as manure at Pacchanady.

The city corporation has been mulling over introducing biometric attendance system for all the civic workers. It will be an Aadhaar-based mobile app biometric attendance system. Even the state government has made biometric attendance for civic workers mandatory.

In the council meeting of the city corporation held recently, the members had charged that the civic workers do not work for minimum eight hours in a day. They had said that they work hardly four to five hours. To check attendance, the city corporation is planning for biometric attendance system, environmental engineer Madhu S Manohar told DH.

The workers should register their thumb impression on the device before 7 am. The devices will be placed at ward offices in Surathkal, Ladyhill, Mannagudde, Jeppu, Central Market, Nehru Maidan, Bunder and other places. The officials will get the attendance status of all the civic workers through mobile phones, he said.

“As Aadhaar is mandatory for the biometric attendance, we have collected Aadhaar numbers of most of the civic workers. Some civic workers from North Karnataka, who do not have Aadhaar, have gone to their native places to get the address proofs for enrolling for Aadhaar.

“Once the number is received, then we create email IDs for each civic worker to generate an OTP, in order to link Aadhaar with biometric attendance device. The process has been initiated,” he explained.

Manohar said there are allegations that the contract agency is not paying wages for the outsourced workers properly and that transparency is not being maintained in the payment process.

To maintain transparency in wage payments and in extending other legal benefits that they are entitled to, the city corporation will soon remit the monthly wages to bank accounts of the outsourced civic workers. Bank accounts of all the civic workers have been opened, the officer said.
DH News Service