

The man who built the online attendance system for India’s government officials - aptwebapps
http://qz.com/277897/meet-the-man-who-built-the-awesome-online-attendance-system-for-indias-government-officials/

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whizzkid
When I saw the screenshots of this article, it reminded me how much stress my
indian colleagues were dealing with, a year ago. We have worked some time
together on a project with Indian people (still friends with them, awesome
people) and the way they explained their working environment was not really
appealing at all unfortunately.

They were indirectly forced to worked more than eight hours a day (around 9 to
10), and was required to report everyday to their managers about the progress
done during the day in a stylesheet. Their managers were trying cut off
financially as much as they can to save some more money in the department so
that managers can get extra money at the end of year depending on the savings.

This caused employees more stress, more work, less comfort and less time with
family. Since there are already a lot of people waiting to get job out there,
they did not have much choice but accept the companies' rules..

I am hoping for a more trust oriented employer-employee relationships for my
indian fellows..

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giis
You are spot on. As an Indian I can confirm this behavior. Managers consider
people as "resource" and treat them as "slave" (not an exaggeration). I hear
lot of my friends use this exact word (slave) and I by myself felt the same
way. They ask people to work for 10-12 hrs. (During 2007/2008 recession,
companies like infosys/tcs increased working hours -8 hrs to 9 hrs -, even
today, its the same hours).

Unless you are close to the manager (do some shoe-licking), working on Indian
IT services is a hell,if you have conscience.

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sjtrny
I see this system as a force that compels people to work longer hours than is
neccesary. Public access to this data will make people name and shame
particular individuals in the bureaucracy who might consistently clock in a
little bit late, even though the reason behind the lateness might be
legitimate (caring for others in family or long term illness). This is not
transparency it just makes bureaucracy worse.

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31reasons
Many indian government employees don't even work 2 hours a day. This system
will definitely help in changing the culture before it becomes an issue.

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cinbun8
"In all, it costs around Rs3 crore ($490,000). “It’s still in the trial
stage,” said Sharma, “And we are still getting feedback on it.”

While the website looks sleek, I'm not sure the what the expected ROI is on
the 3 crores spend. What are we to expect of this system ? That government
officials can be held accountable for not maintaining attendance ?

It reminds me of the very first job I held. Work would be allotted to me and
I'd finish it in 5-6 hours and head home. I'd work an hour or two on
researching how to improve our existing systems and implement them the next
day. At the end of the week a manager pulled out a report that said I'd
clocked low hours and I was punished for it. Those who stayed back to have tea
and a late supper clocked more hours and were considered `hard working`.

Attendance != productivity or progress

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rdraju
While I agree that attendance is a bad measure, knowing the Indian bureaucracy
I welcome anything that makes it more accountable. Most of the organizations
are filled with employees who have no interest / motivation in performing
their duties, are unaccountable to their bosses or public and have no fear of
loosing their job's for ANY reason.

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nawitus
If you measure attendance, you will get attendance. However, there's no value
in attendance.

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curiousDog
Well they are government jobs (not necessarily programming/creative but say
registrars) where attendance does make a difference

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jacalata
I can't say for sure about the Indian government, but the US government
employs a lot of programmers. So not necessarily not programmers, either.

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sauronlord
The real interesting part of this story was barely discussed: That one person
could build an entire system like this for the country.

10 years ago it would have taken a 100 people

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keithpeter
Nice idea for taking the class attendance register at College/school.

Just mild concern about the biometric data being stored centrally.

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shill
They probably chose the biometric data option over ID cards to prevent buddy
punching.

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keithpeter
If they packaged this up and provided an optional ID card scanner front end
could be useful.

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final
Hmmm, can be quite useful to thieves. Is this guy at work now? Yeah, than it's
time to steal some stuff from his home.

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Nano2rad
Biometric based attendance system is violation of privacy.

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jpatel3
Seeing the implementation would be a interesting, but certainly it can be
powerful and bring transparency.

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91pavan
Can someone point to the visualization libraries being used in the attendance
website?

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jishnum
Seems to me like this
[http://www.almsaeedstudio.com/preview](http://www.almsaeedstudio.com/preview)
\- a free template.

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uberneo
checkout the "Attendance In-Time Statistics" pie chart on main Dashboard ..
33% are coming to office after 11 AM ,almost at lunch time.. great isn't :)

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dang
Url changed from [http://scroll.in/article/683083/Meet-the-man-who-built-
the-a...](http://scroll.in/article/683083/Meet-the-man-who-built-the-awesome-
online-attendance-system-for-India%E2%80%99s-government-officials), which
points to this.

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avinassh
How come there are no concerns about privacy? Most of the people's email ID
and personal phone numbers are visible in that site

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enry_straker
They are public officials and those are public contact details.

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njx
If you look at the data.gov site, you will find datasets from Chicago police
department that contains official names and how much salary they withdraw,
everything public.

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saryant
Similarly, the salaries of every employee of the state of Texas, by name:
[http://salaries.texastribune.org/](http://salaries.texastribune.org/)

Teachers, police, politicians, everyone.

