BENGALURU: Marking attendance by signing the ledger or placing the finger on the biometric device could soon be passe. The state government is all set to introduce the Karnataka Advanced Attendance Management System (KAAMS) at all its departments which is enabled by artificial intelligence and geographic information system.
Employees will have to mark their attendance by clicking a selfie from their mobile phone on their office premises and their attendance is captured real time. This AI-enabled attendance system is said to be first of its kind for any government office in the country.
The state government has over 70 departments where over five lakh employees work. Most departments now have the biometric attendance system, where employees swipe their card or keep their finger on the biometric device to mark attendance.
A few departments, where teachers are working (both in government schools and colleges), still manage with the traditional method of signing the ledger.
Sources said it is possible to manipulate the biometric attendance system. Staff may damage the equipment or resort to some other tactic to hide their irregular attendance. But the latest KAAMS, developed by the Centre for e-Governance at the Department for Personnel and Administrative Reforms (DPAR), is geofence-enabled, making it almost impossible to tamper with. Pankaj Kumar Pandey, Principal Secretary, DPAR (e-governance), said this system enables real time attendance and gives no scope for manipulation.
The pilot was run at some places in the health department. Shreevyas HM, Project Director, Artificial Intelligence Cell, CEG, told The New Indian Express that in some government hospitals and primary health centres, doctors were not available at designated places. But with the new system, they had to mark their attendance in person and they could not fabricate it.
Explaining how it works, Shreevyas said employees have to download KAAMS, a mobile application, and have to register one time through their Aadhaar.
Employee data would not be shared with private entities
Their data is also fetched from the government’s database - Human Resource Management Service. During this process, a selfie of the employee is taken, which is compared with the Aadhaar photo using an AI tool.
As the HRMS data gives details of one’s working place, it is geofenced. “Every day, when an employee comes to his/her working place, he/she has to take a selfie. This photo is compared with the selfie taken at the time of registration in the app. There will be no equipment or gadget to mark their attendance and only their cell phone will be used,’’ he said.
The selfie should be taken within 100-200 metres of an employee’s office premises. He, however, said the movement of employees will not be tracked. The entire data of employees will be with the state government and not any private agency.
The system also comes with many features, like alerting the head of the department if an employee comes late or leaves office early continuously for many days.