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Digital attendance for govt staff on duty for Mahakumbh-2025
State govt prepares AI-based digital attendance system for Mahakumbh-2025 with facial recognition, aiming to ensure accurate attendance and prevent manipulation.
With only six months left for the start of mega religious fair Mahakumbh-2025 set to begin from January 14 next, the state government has decided to put in place a smart digital attendance system for workers and officials who would be deputed for the smooth conduct of the once-in-12-year event, a state government spokesman said.
The state government is going to resort to artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure their daily attendance and do real time assessment. The move will end the possibility of either proxy attendance or manipulation at the level of supervisory officers.
In accordance with the vision of CM Yogi Adityanath, the digital attendance system will be developed that will work through facial recognition based mobile app, the officials said.
“During Kumbh-2019, we relied on supervisors of each team for daily and shift attendance and the system was manual. This time we will have AI-based smart app system embellished with face recognition capability in place for the purpose which would save time and be accurate,” said Mahakumbh Mela Adhikari Vijay Kiran Anand, who also served as the Mela Adhikari during Kumbh-2019.
For organising the mega fair, a sprawling tent city is set up on the Sangam banks each time. This temporary city functions as a district with its own police chief or SSP and administrative head or Mela Adhikari. Almost every department too sets up their own offices and set-up in the mela area ranging from police, medical and health, electricity and tourism among others.
For Mahakumbh-2025, this tent city would be spread across 4,000 hectares interconnected with the help of 30 massive pontoon bridges and will have 1.45 lakh toilets. Also, there will be parking facility in 1900 hectares capable of accommodating 5 lakh vehicles at a time with 12 km long bathing ghats in separate stretches overseen by 150 watch towers.
For the expected crowd of 40 crore during the 45-day mega fair, over 20,000 staff, officials and 30,000 security personnel would be deputed. The app will be developed to work on Android and iOS format. The initiative will be operated for a project period of 8 months. For developing the app, the Uttar Pradesh Development Systems Corporation Ltd (UPDESCO) has started preparations according to the needs of Prayagraj Mela Authority, the government spokesperson said.
A short-term notice has been issued by UPDESCO to complete this process. Work will be allocated to a firm already empanelled in UPDESCO, after which it will have to complete the development, testing, operation and maintenance process of the system and app, the spokesman added.
This process will be completed in four phases. In this process, the inception report, project plan, software requirement specification (SRS), capacity building plan, case testing, configuration report, deployment, testing and commissioning process will be completed, he said.
After the mobile app’s development, it will be rolled out after completing the deployment, testing and commissioning process, and after the go-live report and user acceptance testing (UAT) process. The deadline for the designated agency to complete the process has been set within 25 days after the allocation of work.
