Thiruvananthapuram: The secretariat staff, who are away from work without any genuine reason or are found absent from seats during office hours, or arrive late three days consecutively, will face salary cut from January 1. The government has made bio-metric punching mandatory for all staff members. The punching system is seen as a major step towards ensuring efficiency, accountability and speedy file movement in secretariat. Soon after coming to power, chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan had spelt out his government's commitment towards creating a work culture that people desired. Over the past several months, efforts were on to take the service organisations on board on improving attendance.
The government is keen to improve attendance to ensure effective implementation of Right to Service Act. The government believes that people are deeply concerned about system of governance, inefficiency, corruption, mismanagement, over centralisation, lack of professionalism and red tape and hence there is a dire need to make immediate changes in the system lest bureaucracy gets isolated among the public. It will be mandatory for the staff to wear identity cards during office hours from January 1. Surprise checks will be carried out to check if employees are entering office after punching in the morning and moving out soon after.
It is felt that irregular attendance and absence of officials from seat during duty hours have adversely affected file movement in government departments. The assessment carried out General Administration Department in October about the file movement in secretariat had found that the performance of majority of the departments was dismal. Among the bad performers were – NORKA, fisheries, parliamentary affairs, forest revenue, fisheries and culture. Through these interventions the government wants to make services accountable and useful for public. But at the same time it has drawn a plan to give top priority to redress the grievances of the employees.
