Thanks to biometric attendance, 1,200 civic staffers face pay cut

From peon to officer, around 1,200 employees of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) face salary cuts for not reaching office on time, thanks to the Aadhaar-enabled biometric attendance system (AEBS) introduced in municipal offices across the city on July 15.

These employees, whose arrival at work was off by more than 15 minutes, are the first lot of civic staffers who will have to forego a part of their salary — for one to seven days — depending upon the number of 'absent' remarks they logged because of reporting late.

Civic employees were, understandably, not eager to embrace AEBS. Many had even complained about glitches in the system during the trial period, which began after the civic authority registered its 1.07 lakh employees on it in May. "There were problems with the new system. If 10 to 12 employees placed their fingers on the machine one after the other in a short span of time, the machine would hang and require rebooting," said a staff from the H-East ward office.

But the administration announced through a circular in July that, hang-ups or not, the system was here to stay.

A senior official from the BMC's Information Technology department defended the devices. "One biometric machine has been assigned for 40 staff members. We add more machines if there is more staff," he said, adding that the machine takes eight seconds to process a single attendance, and therefore 3 to 4 minutes to process some 40 fingerprints.

Sudhir Naik, deputy municipal commissioner (general administration), confirmed that around 1,200 employees reported late to the office, and added: "There is no use of AEBS if employees keep coming late."

A senior Human Resources official from BMC said that the department had sent out a circular to all divisions including ward offices, informing them that AEBS was mandatory from July 15. "The date was decided after trial runs to weed out any hurdles," they said.

A copy of the circular was seen put up near the biometric machine in some of the ward offices.