Smart watches to track attendance of sanitary staff

Sanjay Bumbroo

Tribune News Service

Panchkula, September 21 

To keep a check on irregularities in attendance of the sanitation staff, the Panchkula Municipal Corporation will soon introduce GPS-enabled wrist watches for its sanitary workers.

The system integrator, entrusted to the ITI, a Central Government undertaking agency, will provide end-to-end solution, including supply of 1,000 GPS-enabled wrist watches, servers, application software, web interface and related MIS reports.

Sharing information with Chandigarh Tribune, MC Administrator Rajesh Jogpal said the MC would implement the system under the smart city project and Rs 199 per month would be paid as rental charges for each 1,000 wrist watches for five years. 

He said this was being done to record the attendance of over 1,000 workers, including the sanitary workers.

Jogpal said all workers, including permanent, contractual and outsources employees besides the gardeners, would be provided the GPS-enabled watches soon. 

He said this would be the first project in any of the municipal corporations in the North India which would help them check absenteeism. 

He said the objectives of the GPS-enabled wrist watches included recording attendance of sanitary workers shift-wise, prevention and control of misuse of manual attendance system, maintenance of transparency, accountability in operations and weeding out fake, duplicate and false workers. Often, citizens and even councillors complained of workers’ irregular attendance, sweeping and collection of garbage. 

He said under the new system, attendance would be taken ward-wise at the work location and updated immediately from the field using GPS networks daily on a real-time basis. 

He said the attendance would be calculated based on the number of shifts attended by the worker and would be consolidated for the entire month.