Mumbai: Following a glitch in the BMC’s biometric attendance system that led to hundreds of employees being paid less for the month of February, KEM Hospital Dean Dr. Avinash Supe has written to the administration requesting more time to implement the system.
The glitch had hit civic hospital staff the hardest, as they work in variable shifts. Dr. Supe’s letter to Municipal Commissioner Ajoy Mehta, Additional Municipal Commissioner Idzes Kundan and Deputy Municipal Commissioner Sudhir Naik says biometric attendance will have to be configured for hospital staff on rotation and reliever duties, who need more time to mark their attendance. He said 60% of the staff at major civic hospitals have fixed duties, while 35% are on rotation and 5% on reliever shifts.
“There are many things involved. Besides shifting duties, they also have compensatory offs, which need to be incorporated in the software,” he said. The letter also said that the biometric attendance system has started incorporating shift timings from February 2018, but the different shift timings will have to be entered in the system.
The biometric attendance system was introduced in civic hospitals in 2017 to ensure punctuality by civic staff, who are infamous for marking attendance by proxy, reporting late for work and adjusting shifts as per their convenience and influence in the adm.
A staff member at Sion Hospital said the civic body should have thought of giving some time for the system to function properly. “The parallel system of manual attendance has to be kept till the biometric system becomes foolproof. The employee should not be made to suffer in the name of technology. Everyone has liabilities and are very dependent on their full salaries,” he said.
Presently, heads of departments are updating the attendance details of their staff the system so that the arrears can be credited to employee accounts in the next few days.
