Modi Is Watching Bureaucrats, Launches E-Surveillance To Keep Tab On Attendance

NEW DELHI: Narendra Modi has earned a reputation as something of a control freak since becoming prime minister, ordering bureaucrats to throw out office junk and go to work on a public holiday to clean the toilets.

Now he has taken things a step further by launching an electronic surveillance system that will track whether 100,000 government officials are showing up for work on time.

Not only is Big Brother watching the 'babus', as India's pen pushers are known, but the public can also keep track of them through a web site - attendance.gov.in - that quietly went live at the end of September.

The dashboard of the Biometric Attendance System displays a dynamic, real-time chart of how many people are at work. It is also possible to click through and check when an individual checks in and logs out of the system.

"It all started with the prime minister giving the idea," said project coordinator Shefali Sushil Dash of India's National Informatics Centre, the agency for e-government initiatives.

The system is based on the Aadhaar (Foundation) biometric identity card system launched by the last government that now covers 680 million people, and refines a pilot project launched by techno-bureaucrat Ram Sewak Sharma in the state of Jharkhand.
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