Leaving early from work will cost a Central government employee half a day’s leave.
With the Centre planning to expand Aadhaar-linked biometric attendance system to all its offices by January-end, latecomers and early-leavers will be in trouble as there will be an electronic trail of their movements during work.
The Aadhaar-Enabled Biometric Attendance System (AEBAS), an initiative of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is being installed in all Central government offices.
The government has set a deadline of December 31 for offices in Delhi to have AEBAS installed, while offices in other cities should have it by January 26 next year. The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) has issued an order in this regard.
The DoPT has said that half a day’s casual leave would be debited for each day of late attendance, but late attendance up to an hour on not more than two occasions in a month, and for justifiable reasons, might be condoned by the competent authority.
In addition to debiting casual leave, disciplinary action may also be taken against habitually late government servants. “Early leaving is also to be treated in the same manner as latecoming,” said the order. The web portal to display government servants’ attendance publicly showed that around 1,140 employees worked on Sunday in different departments.
Thirty-eight officials of the Home Ministry had worked on a Sunday, 34 of them in North Block, where the ministry is located. Fifteen External Affairs Ministry officials worked in South Block, while another 15 worked in different other offices. The highest number of officials present on Sunday belonged to the CPWD, which had 210 officials working, followed by the Electronic Media Monitoring Wing’s 77.
As of now, 62,571 employees in 300 offices have been registered with the biometric portal, created by a team led by Ram Sewak Sharma, the Union Communication and IT secretary who was chief secretary in Jharkhand.
In the last one and a half months, only 11,405 employees were added to the system, prompting the government to set a deadline.