In Noida, ₹20K smart watches to track sanitation employees

NOIDA The Noida authority will provide smartwatches, each worth ₹20,000, to 1,000 sanitation employees to verify if an employee is working in his/her designated

NOIDA The Noida authority will provide smartwatches, each worth ₹20,000, to 1,000 sanitation employees to verify if an employee is working in his/her designated area.

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Officials said the move is aimed at ensuring the workers report on time for work and carry out their duties without fail. “We will buy 500 smartwatches, while the rest will be donated by the HCL Foundation, under its corporate social responsibility fund. The motive of the move is to enhance the work quality of our sanitation staff and also to send across a message that if anyone does not report on time or does not work properly in their designated areas, then the watch will inform us about his or her location,” said Ritu Maheshwari, chief executive officer of the Noida authority.

The authority’s control room will monitor the location of sanitation workers via the Global Positioning System (GPS), which will be enabled in the smart wristwatches.

The authority has decided to provide watches to employees after it realised that many sanitation workers were reporting late and also not doing their job appropriately in their respective areas. In August, the authority had started a biometric attendance system to ensure that workers report on time to work. However, after the employees reported on time, there was no mechanism to check whether they were working at their respective locations, said officials.

Therefore, the authority has decided to implement this move to ensure discipline among its sanitation staff. “The Indore Municipal Corporation has used watches to instil discipline among sanitation employees and their experiment was successful. So, we have also decided to use this method to ensure that we get good results from our staff,” said Maheshwari.

The authority is likely to start the process of handing over the watches to employees from the next month. “In two months, all watches will be handed over. A control room will be able to track the location of each employee, through the watch, and action will be taken against those found not working properly in his/her designated area,” said Maheshwari.

Officials have estimated the total cost of the initiative at ₹2 crores, of which half would be borne by the HCL Foundation. The Noida authority has around 4,000 sanitation employees, who are engaged in sweeping, collecting garbage and cleaning of city roads.