The man who built the online attendance system for India’s government officials | Hacker News Reader

The man who built the online attendance system for India’s government officials

qz.com

72 pointsaptwebapps28 comments

When I saw the screenshots of this article, it reminded me how much stress my indian colleagues were dealing with, a year ago. We have worked some time together on a project with Indian people (still friends with them, awesome people) and the way they explained their working environment was not really appealing at all unfortunately.

They were indirectly forced to worked more than eight hours a day (around 9 to 10), and was required to report everyday to their managers about the progress done during the day in a stylesheet. Their managers were trying cut off financially as much as they can to save some more money in the department so that managers can get extra money at the end of year depending on the savings.

This caused employees more stress, more work, less comfort and less time with family. Since there are already a lot of people waiting to get job out there, they did not have much choice but accept the companies' rules..

I am hoping for a more trust oriented employer-employee relationships for my indian fellows..

You are spot on. As an Indian I can confirm this behavior. Managers consider people as "resource" and treat them as "slave" (not an exaggeration). I hear lot of my friends use this exact word (slave) and I by myself felt the same way. They ask people to work for 10-12 hrs. (During 2007/2008 recession, companies like infosys/tcs increased working hours -8 hrs to 9 hrs -, even today, its the same hours).

Unless you are close to the manager (do some shoe-licking), working on Indian IT services is a hell,if you have conscience.

I see this system as a force that compels people to work longer hours than is neccesary. Public access to this data will make people name and shame particular individuals in the bureaucracy who might consistently clock in a little bit late, even though the reason behind the lateness might be legitimate (caring for others in family or long term illness). This is not transparency it just makes bureaucracy worse.

Many indian government employees don't even work 2 hours a day. This system will definitely help in changing the culture before it becomes an issue.

"In all, it costs around Rs3 crore ($490,000). “It’s still in the trial stage,” said Sharma, “And we are still getting feedback on it.”

While the website looks sleek, I'm not sure the what the expected ROI is on the 3 crores spend. What are we to expect of this system ? That government officials can be held accountable for not maintaining attendance ?

It reminds me of the very first job I held. Work would be allotted to me and I'd finish it in 5-6 hours and head home. I'd work an hour or two on researching how to improve our existing systems and implement them the next day. At the end of the week a manager pulled out a report that said I'd clocked low hours and I was punished for it. Those who stayed back to have tea and a late supper clocked more hours and were considered `hard working`.

Attendance != productivity or progress

While I agree that attendance is a bad measure, knowing the Indian bureaucracy I welcome anything that makes it more accountable. Most of the organizations are filled with employees who have no interest / motivation in performing their duties, are unaccountable to their bosses or public and have no fear of loosing their job's for ANY reason.

If you measure attendance, you will get attendance. However, there's no value in attendance.

Well they are government jobs (not necessarily programming/creative but say registrars) where attendance does make a difference

I can't say for sure about the Indian government, but the US government employs a lot of programmers. So not necessarily not programmers, either.

The question is what is the current attendance?

If attendance is a problem, then it makes perfect sense to measure it.

The real interesting part of this story was barely discussed: That one person could build an entire system like this for the country.

10 years ago it would have taken a 100 people

Nice idea for taking the class attendance register at College/school.

Just mild concern about the biometric data being stored centrally.

They probably chose the biometric data option over ID cards to prevent buddy punching.

If they packaged this up and provided an optional ID card scanner front end could be useful.

Hmmm, can be quite useful to thieves. Is this guy at work now? Yeah, than it's time to steal some stuff from his home.

Biometric based attendance system is violation of privacy.

Seeing the implementation would be a interesting, but certainly it can be powerful and bring transparency.

Can someone point to the visualization libraries being used in the attendance website?

Looks like Highcharts.

yeah pure highcharts .. and this is the theme "http://wrapbootstrap.com/preview/WB08N77TC" which they have used .. costs around $15

Seems to me like this http://www.almsaeedstudio.com/preview - a free template.

checkout the "Attendance In-Time Statistics" pie chart on main Dashboard .. 33% are coming to office after 11 AM ,almost at lunch time.. great isn't :)

Url changed from http://scroll.in/article/683083/Meet-the-man-who-built-the-a..., which points to this.

How come there are no concerns about privacy? Most of the people's email ID and personal phone numbers are visible in that site

They are public officials and those are public contact details.

I would be a lot happier if this applied equally to the elected officials as much as the bureaucracy. What makes it difficult is what is the "office" for elected officials. One can argue that they are making more of a difference on the "field" rather than the parliament, but usually the reality is that they are mostly twiddling thumbs somewhere else entirely and that would be the better case scenario, the more common case would be that they are too busy counting the money.

If you look at the data.gov site, you will find datasets from Chicago police department that contains official names and how much salary they withdraw, everything public.

Similarly, the salaries of every employee of the state of Texas, by name: http://salaries.texastribune.org/

Teachers, police, politicians, everyone.

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