Half of BMC biometric machines useless

This leaves attendance system open for manipulation, babus indulge in tampering.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s efforts to control errant civic employees and instil punctuality in them have failed miserably. More than half the biometric machines installed in municipal offices to mark attendance are not working, leaving the attendance system open for manipulation.

At most of places, these machines have been tampered with by employees so that their attendance is not registered. The failure of this system has forced the BMC to scrap this ambitious project and look for new options.

According to the civic officials, 1,050 biometric machines were installed at 61 municipal offices including civic headquarters, 24 ward offices, major hospitals, octroi nakas, sewerage department, fire brigade, municipal press, estate department, markets department and Worli data centre.

Data available with 756 biometric machines shows that only 294 machines are working whereas 462 are not operational. The BMC procured these machines from M/s Bharat Electronics. An official said, “We installed bio-metric machines for attendance so that there is no chance of proxy or any other discrepancy.”

The civic body has around 1.18 lakh employees on its rolls, with about 7,500 of them reporting to the headquarters on working days. The BMC officials earlier had used the punching card system for attendance system, but over the years it was misused too. After this, the BMC decided to introduce biometric attendance systems, preventing proxy attendance. But it too has failed to achieve the expected results.

“The system had many loopholes. It has no provision for modification in case of transfers and promotions of employees. The extension was given to the firm to make necessary changes in the system. However, they failed to do it. We are now planning to terminate the contract and have asked the legal department for its opinion,” said a senior civic official.

Senior Congress corporator Pravin Chheda blamed the administration for the failure of the system. “At some places, civic employees had tampered with the machines, but officials turned a blind eye towards this.”

“We are using the old muster system to mark employees’ attendance. As far as the scam of closing down machines is concerned, we have asked concerned department heads and ward officers to take action,” said the official.

“The system is outdated. We are now planning to introduce a new system on the basis of Mantralaya software developed by National Informatics Centre,” said Mahesh Narvekar, the head of BMC’s information and technology department.