jai ho NaMo, we are sooooooooooooooooooooo proud of you!! NEW DELHI — Beware, o lollygagging Indian bureaucrats. If it was not already apparent that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would display a schoolmaster’s intolerance for laxity, the recent introduction of an electronic monitoring system — capable of registering the daily entry and exit times of 100,000 government officials — has made the situation abundantly clear. The system, accessible to the public on the website attendance.gov.in, began working in early October, providing a digital dashboard that so far displays the comings and goings of more than 50,600 employees spread across 150 departments. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage Narendra Modi Outlines Goals for India on Eve of a Visit With ObamaSEPT. 28, 2014 Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Saturday. Indian Leader Narendra Modi, Once Unwelcome in U.S., Gets Rock Star ReceptionSEPT. 27, 2014 The rollout of the Biometric Attendance System coincided with an article in The Times of India that said that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s president had fitted the vehicles of party members campaigning for state legislative elections with GPS units, gathering real-time evidence that they are, in fact, on the trail and not lingering in hotel lounges. Party officials would not confirm the report. Many ordinary Indians have little love for bureaucrats, who are widely viewed as corrupt, indolent and obfuscating, and Mr. Modi’s pledge of toughness was a central message of his campaign. The arrival of the new government was accompanied by rumors — widely circulated but never confirmed — that his office maintained a list of officials with regular tee-times at exclusive golf courses and kept tabs on who was meeting whom in hotel clubs. Voters approached last week expressed full-throated approval of the planned surveillance. “My own uncle is a government servant and we see him go into the office at 11 and so on,” said Shubham Tiwari, 20, a graduate student. “What kind of work will they do when there is not one iota of self-discipline? As it is, all the babus do is pass on files,” he added, using a colloquial term for bureaucrats. “At least they should do that with punctuality.” Vridhi Kapani, 21, an interior designer, complained that every time she visited a bank or government office, “we mostly find babus out for tea breaks or some other.” She called the notion of GPS surveillance “fabulous,” and complained only that it was too limited, recommending that political figures should also be tracked on hidden cameras, “to see how they are bribing people for votes.” The new system requires government employees to register their presence at the entrance to their offices using a biometric scan of a fingerprint or iris. As the system went live, some longtime civil servants acknowledged to Indian news organizations the practice of “proxy attendance,” in which employees would fail to show up for long stretches but, with colleagues’ assistance, register as present in the department’s attendance diary. There were also some voices of caution. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a respected political analyst, wrote that biometric tracking of government employees might turn out to be counterproductive, establishing a system that “would probably produce more gaming of the system than genuine performance.” “It is a mistake to think that discipline can replace the need for trust,” he wrote. “At most, it displaces trust. But the harm it produces is to create a culture of suspicion, where distrust becomes the norm.” But Mr. Mehta’s warning was clearly not fully convincing to all the readers of the daily Indian Express newspaper, a number of whom posted incredulous online comments in response, lustily endorsing the surveillance plan. “Sir, Have you been to a Government office before?” one of them read. “If you have dealt with the same, I’m sure you’ll have a diametrically opposite view on this matter.”
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 13:56:57 +0000