Central Government Employees start work late, stay late – The Hindu

The occasional surprise checks by Union Ministers to see if government employees are reporting to work on time may not have brought in 100 per cent compliance, but employees aren’t as late to office as widely perceived.

The Hindu got exclusive access to one week of Central government attendance data, thanks to the first publicly available database of employees, and found that employees tend to be a bit late in getting to work, but most work a full day.

Two weeks ago, the Union government launched attendance.gov.in, a web portal that allows live tracking of over 50,000 Central government employees the moment he signs in and out of work.

Using a Unique Identification Number (UID)-enabled back-end, the system allows the employees’ sign-in to be authenticated and uploaded to the website in under two seconds. Personally identifiable information about individual employees is not available for public view.

Getting to work at 9 a.m. sharp is still a challenge. Just over 20 per cent of the employees swiped in by 9 on most days, but attendance picks up in the 9 a.m. to 9.30 a.m. period, when the largest number of swipe-ins takes place. The median in-time, The Hindu found, is 9.18 a.m.

Consequently, the employees leave office a little late, with 5 p.m. to 5.30 p.m. being the swipe out time among most. The median exit is 5.45 p.m.

The numbers show that on most days — except Friday, the last working day, — eight of 10 Central government employees worked for at least eight hours. This figure is only indicative as some employees appear to be making errors while swiping in or out.

Junior employees come in earlier than those higher up the bureaucracy, but this could be on account of the fact that senior bureaucrats’ days often begin with meetings in other offices and locations, an Additional Secretary whom The Hindu reached for comment said.

“We are very clear that what we are offering are the tools for measurement. Decisions on what to do with attendance data is not our job — that is for the personnel ministry,” Ram Sewak Sharma, Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology, who is responsible for the project, told The Hindu.

Mr. Sharma launched Jharkhand’s version of the attendance portal during his stint there as Chief Secretary after his posting as Director-General of the Unique Identification Authority of India.

Individual employees’ data in the new Central government portal is not available for public view, but the organisation shared one week’s data — after anonymising it — with The Hindu for analysis.