The facial recognition technology introduced by the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) for recording the attendance of sanitation workers has yielded results in financial as well as numerical terms.
A statement from GHMC has informed that there have been significant savings to the exchequer on the expenditure incurred by way of the new system, when it comes to maintenance of attendance application with high accuracy.
Annual expenditure on the system has come down from the earlier ₹1.93 crore, to ₹67 lakh.
There is also a significant drop in the overall expenditure towards wages, the bill of which has come down to ₹31 crore from the earlier ₹33.5 crore, owing to weeding out of the fake attendance. Identification of the actual staff attending duties on the field and planning of the staff deployment have become easier. A comparison of the number of sanitation, entomology and veterinary workers on the field has clearly showed fewer workers and field assistants in the facial recognition system.
There is a reduction of 33 SFAs, 912 sanitation workers, 25 entomology workers and 36 veterinary staff, which also reflects in wages payable. There have been serious issues of fake attendance recorded through silicon fingerprints, which was reported more than once. Allegations also abounded about Assistant Medical Officers and SFAs colluding to record higher number of worker attendance in order to pocket the extra wages.
While biometric devices had been introduced for transparency in attendance, ways were figured to circumvent them too. In order to address this issue, facial recognition attendance management system was introduced in a pilot basis in the Karwan Circle in January this year.
Upon successful implementation of the pilot, the contract for implementing the system for the whole of GHMC was awarded through the due bidding process. Live mobile application for facial recognition has been deployed from the first week of April in the Sanitation, Entomology and Veterinary wings of GHMC, the statement said.
Additional Commissioner Sneha Shabarish conducted a surprise inspection of the attendance through mobile app on field at Domalguda on Thursday. She explained that the facial recognition app captures the photo and checks for liveliness in the face.
Published - June 21, 2024 01:10 am IST
