The Hindu 10.09.2014
Bogus employees, duplicate attendance galore in SDMC’s biometric system
Software lacks support mechanism to check duplication
Sanitation workers in the South Delhi Municipal
Corporation have managed to share fingerprints with colleagues, while
others have got brand new sets of biometric data with each posting.
The records of the SDMC have a range of anomalies, including ghost employees, no check on hiring substitute
safai karamcharis
and incomplete documents at the time of hiring.
These
irregularities were highlighted by the Delhi Police’s Economic Offences
Wing in January this year. EOW’s Deputy Commissioner of Police S.D.
Mishra wrote a letter to SDMC Commissioner Manish Gupta raising the
issue of “lacunae in system of record maintenance”.
The
Crime Branch had been asked by the High Court to investigate a case of
ghost employees in the erstwhile Municipal Corporation of Delhi. In his
January 29 letter, Mr. Mishra said the “investigating agency faced many
hurdles” while enquiring into the Jagrook Welfare Society case due to a
lack of “correct information and documents”.
He added
that the software provided by Transline India Business Solution did not
have any support mechanism to check duplication in the database.
Moreover, he said, the software did not store the employees’
fingerprints when they were being fed into the system.
The
biometric id changed with transfers to different Zones or departments,
there was no control over the hiring of substitutes when
safai karamcharis
went on leave and there was no police verification of new employees.
“The addresses of substitute
safai karamcharis
could not be traced despite best efforts as many jhuggies were
demolished/relocated and their subsequent addresses were not collected
by MCD,” stated Mr. Mishra’s letter.
The DCP went on to suggest a “review of the entire system of recruitment and deployment of
safai karamcharis
” in the SDMC. This letter was highlighted by SDMC Leader of Opposition
Farhad Suri at a recent meeting. Mr. Suri alleged corruption in the
manipulation of the biometric attendance system.
In
fact, the unified MCD’s own Enforcement Cell had found loopholes in the
system in 2011. “The biometric attendance reports are not giving
authentic data,” the director of the cell had written on February 1,
2011.
The Enforcement Cell found that employees in
its own office were shown to be present in the biometric rolls when they
were absent. Some names were not present on the list despite being
punched into the system in a valid manner. One biometric id was being
shared by two employees, and entry, exit and total working hours of many
employees of the same department were identical on a particular date.
When
asked about the irregularities highlighted in Mr. Mishra’s letter, Mr.
Gupta said: “I don’t remember the letter as it was eight months ago.
But, we have been working towards making our system better.”
In
13 wards, on a pilot basis, the civic body has done away with manual
registers, so employees have to use the biometric system as it is linked
to their salaries. Mr. Gupta said since the beginning of this year the
usage of the system has gone up from 20-30 per cent to 80 per cent. Even
Mr. Gupta and other senior officials mark their attendance through the
biometric system, but there is a problem in its operations at the zonal
level.
“We have around 40,000 employees, so it is not an easy task to switch to the biometric system in one go,” said Mr. Gupta.
