Departments under central government have registered on the common Bio-Metric Attendance Portal installing with the bio-metric attendance terminals at entry gates of various central offices building connected with Wi-Fi access points and mobile connectivity. This system would be appropriate in Nagaland where there are a lot of ghost employees, absenteeism, lethargic public servants, and teachers with proxy which accounts nearly half of the government servants in Nagaland becomes non productive assets. Employment is the state of having paid work or using services in return for payment but we encounter that many paid employees excusing that they have unavailability of work so remain absence from office.
A ghost employee is someone on the payroll who doesn’t actually work for a victim department. Absenteeism or tardiness is that someone taking longer or more frequent breaks from a duty without any valid leave or considerable reasons. The system that some employees tend to work in a very very lethargic manner thinking that salary is coming so what is the need to do work thereby they don’t take much pain in discharging their duties.
This laziness of colleagues dampens the congenial atmosphere at the workplace. There are some government servants mostly teachers with proxy who draws pay in ease. Hardly one-fifth or one-fourth of their net salary goes to proxy and the real teachers enjoy with four-fifth or three-fourth of the amounts of pay sitting at home. Innocent students suffer.
Schools suffer. Departments suffer. The fault lies in the system we practiced. Government incurred losses cumulatively over the years by paying on non plan expenditure. There are ninety five thousands nine hundreds & three (95,903) employees in Nagaland as on March 2014 which accounts 4.85% of the total population (19,78,502) of Nagaland and 9.85% of the total workers (9,74,122) in the state as per 2011 census. (Source: Nagaland Economic Survey 2015-2016 published by the directorate of Economics & Statistics) Of the revenue expenditure of the state, salaries & wages alone is estimated to 44.54 per cent and 30.66 per cent of the revenue expenditure and total expenditure on consolidated Fund 2015-16 (BE). A bigger loss is the payment of salaries & wages on the irresponsible state employees.
To eliminate absenteeism and malpractices; and for transparency and accountability we need to introduce Bio-metric Attendance System (BAS) installing with fingerprints recognition technology at every office with internet connectivity and this will be a step towards providing fool proof security ensuring that the employee is personally present to mark the attendance. This initiative will make attendance in government organization transparent providing attendance and leave features more robust with this online logging tool. This would track each and every person coming to the office in actually who he claims to be or not with their times of arrival and off and other details, and basing on the attendance data visible on the portal would monitor strictly. This will be considered as far superior and most reliable technology giving ultimate solution for the long problems of proxy signing/punching.
