Biometric Attendance : Iris scanner to come in, departure may be from other building

Clearly in no mood to offer any let up in getting government officials to turn up for work in time, the Narendra Modi government is all set to install iris scanners alongside fingerprint reading machines in many central government offices just to ensure that no employee is left out of the purview of the Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Attendance System (AEBAS).

The move, government officials said, is essentially aimed at ensuring that no government employee escapes marking attendance on the AEBAS just in case some of the wall mounted bio-metric attendance terminals are unable to read their fingerprints. Officials said there had been a some isolated cases where a few of these machines had reported glitches in recognising fingerprints of registered employees.

Since the electronic attendance system has already been linked to Aadhaar, the fingerprints of employees are authenticated online by matching them with the biometrics stored in the UIDAI database against the employees’ Aadhaar number. “Since a scan of the iris is also a part of the biometric data captured by UID to generate the Aadhaar number, iris scans can also be used to mark attendance using the AEBAS,” an official explained.

Sources said that around 200 iris scanning devices are already under installation in around 100 government building in the national capital. “The installation of these scanners will further strengthen the AEBAS,” an official said. Over 87,000 government employees, from 395 organisations, have registered for the AEBAS so far. Close to 5,000 fingerprint reading devices — including biometric terminals and desktop devices — have been installed in central government offices.

Simultaneously, efforts are on to synchronise all the wall mounted bio-metric attendance terminals installed in government buildings in the capital to enable users the flexibility to mark their “out” attendance from a terminal that may not necessarily be installed in their own respective office buildings.

“Often, officers and employees are required to go to other government offices located in buildings other than the ones where their own offices are. This leads to a situation where many of these employees are forced to come back late evening to their own offices just to mark their attendance. To tackle this, the wall mounted bio-metric attendance terminal are being synchronised so that an employee from say Shastri Bhavan may be able to mark his “out” attendance from say Rail Bhavan,” an official said.

Source : An article by Mr Raghabendra Rao inIndian Express