Nagpur: To keep a check on the irregularities in attendance of sanitation staff, the Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) has introduced GPS-enabled wrist watches for its sanitary workers.
“The NMC is implementing the system under the Smart City project and Rs 207 per month towards rental charges for each of 8,000 wrist watch for seven years is being paid. The exercise is to record the attendance of over 7,500 NMC sanitary workers,” NMC’s health officer (sanitation) Dr Pradip Dasarwar told TOI.
“The registration of sanitary workers from Dharampeth zone is almost complete and the work to obtain details of other zones is in progress.” In Dharampeth zone, the watches will start functioning from April 16,” he said.
“Within a month, all the sanitary workers will be provided the GPS-enabled watches,” Dasarwar said.
“The health department’s (sanitation) pilot project initiated in Ashi Nagar zone to track sanitary workers through GPS-enabled wrist watches exposed 55% absenteeism,” he said.
Last year, the NMC had distributed these wrist watches on a pilot basis to 10 workers in the first phase to monitor daily movement in zone 9. The department found 10 workers working less than 3.5 hours against the mandatory eight hours.
The department submitted the result before the standing committee. Subsequently, nod to implement the new system was given.
The system integrator entrusted to ITI, a central government undertaking agency, will provide end-to-end solution, including supply of 8,000 GPS-enabled wrist watches, servers, application software, web interface and related MIS reports.
The NMC will get funds from central government under the Smart City mission, the health officer said, adding that the monthly expense for this will be around Rs 16.56 lakh.
“The objectives of the GPS-enabled wrist watches include recording attendance of sanitary workers shift-wise, prevention and control of misuse of manual attendance system, maintenance of transparency, accountability in operations and weeding out of the fake, duplicate, and false workers,” said Dasarwar.
Often, citizens and even corporators complain about workers’ irregular attendance, sweeping and collection of garbage.
Dasarwar said under the new system, attendance will be taken ward-wise at the work location and updated immediately from the field using GPS networks daily on a real-time basis.
The attendance will be calculated based on the number of shifts attended by the worker and will be consolidated for the entire month. Under the current system, the attendance of sanitary workers is being recorded one time in a day.
To prevent this, the NMC, through Kanak Resources Management Limited (KRML), has already installed GPS tracking system in 262 vehicles engaged in transporting garbage from the city to the dumping yard in Bhandewadi.
