Face-recognition for attendance in Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation

Hyderabad: Unhappy with the bio-metric attendance system (BAS), the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation has decided to register attendance of all permanent and outsourced employees by face-recognition. The BAS was introduced to curb malpractices and manipulation by the staff. Civic body officials said that the system had however not brought the desired results.

On several occasions, the bio-metric machines failed to detect thumb impressions of employees, particularly sanitation workers, leaving a scope for field staff to indulge in irregularities. Attendance had to even be recorded manually on such occasions. A senior GHMC official said that the corporation will verify the old data with current in order to check the irregularities after introducing the face-recognition attendance system. Names of all 2,626 sanitation worker groups, 2,674 regular workers, 18,382 contract workers, 46 sanitary supervisors, 305 sanitary jawans and 948 SFAs will be scrutinised.

Municipal commissioner B. Janardhan Reddy registered with the face-recognition software to kick off the new attendance method, which will first be used for employees in the GHMC headquarters and later expanded to zonal and circle offices.