Fingerprint machine to IMC?s rescue

REDUCE A man to a piece of paper, goes the security adage, and sooner or later he?ll give you the slip. A theory made manifest everyday by scores of IMC employees who cover up for absent colleagues by signing in their names in the attendance register.

REDUCE A man to a piece of paper, goes the security adage, and sooner or later he’ll give you the slip. A theory made manifest everyday by scores of IMC employees who cover up for absent colleagues by signing in their names in the attendance register.

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Civic body bosses have been driven to despair by the practice which not only prevents efficient discharge of duties but also ensures that truant employees get paid even for days when they don’t report for work.

Now, the IMC administration has decided to go the biometric way to put the finger on absentee employees and their collaborators. Fingerprint-based personal identifications systems have been installed at the Corporation’s zone 3 (Shaheed Bhagat Singh) and ward 54 offices to check impersonation.

Employees at both the places are required to register right thumb impressions on the machine upon arrival. The machine then records the time and date when the impression is made and lists it against a unique Personal Identification Number assigned to each individual.

Staffers on field duty are also required to tell where they are headed and this information is punched in manually by the machine operator. Thus, making it easier for zone and ward officials not only to keep track of employees but also, if needed, verify whether they carried out the assigned task.

The machines, installed on a month-long trial basis on February 1, have worked like a charm. “Attendance has increased by nearly 40 per cent since we started using the fingerprinting machine,” says zone 3 president Sandhya Ajmera.

“Impersonation by signing in for someone else has, of course, become non-existent.” Ajmera reckons that by allowing it to dock wages of absent employees the biometric devices have already saved the Corporation Rs 40,000. Not bad for a machine that costs a mere Rs 1,500.

Efforts are underway to further fine-tune the attendance machines by appending a photograph of each employee to the PIN. “This can be done at no extra cost as the Corporation recently photographed all employees during a physical verification exercise,” adds the ward 54 corporator.

The biometric machine installation was the brainchild of her husband, Sunil Ajmera, who came across the devices at the Hyderabad Municipal Corporation office. After adding software to the devices to make them IMC-centric Ajmera suggested to his wife that she sound out then Municipal Commissioner P Narhari on the idea of installing them at IMC offices.

“The Commissioner was enthusiastic and ordered the installation of the devices at the two offices for a month-long trial run”. Orders for the installation were issued on January 24 and the fingerprint-based identification system began being used a week later, she informed.

Thumb impression
Employees at both the places are required to register right thumb impressions on the machine upon arrival. The machine then records the time and date when the impression is made and lists it against a unique PIN assigned to each individual.