A GPS guided biometric system in Ambala will ensure that its street cleaners actually report for work and clean the roads and clear garbage dumps
Sudhir Chowdhary
Let us face it—our cities are dirty, our towns are even worse. Despite astronomical amounts of money being spent in various beautification drives across India’s cities and towns, dirty main streets specked with uncleared rubbish, construction rubble and civic litter remain an eyesore. A key reason cited by both residents and officials is the rampant delinquency of the army of safai karamcharis, or street cleaners, who remain a law to themselves.
Ambala Municipal Corporation has embraced modern technology in its endeavour to provide a neat and clean city to its residents. Recently, MapmyIndia executed a GPS guided biometric system for the city’s civic body. The system, called MapmyIndia GPS guided biometric system (MGGBS), will ensure that about 1,000 safai karmchaaris and 150-strong office staff 150, report for work and reach their designated areas.
Rakesh Verma, MD, MapmyIndia informed that the MGGBS has been especially developed to ensure that manpower is gainfully deployed on ground in a smooth and efficient way. The system comprises fingerprint identification, bio-metrics, digital mapping, tracking/navigation that are fully integrated into the MGGBS components via hand-held GPS enabled biometric machines, fixed biometric machines, attendance software and MapmyIndia Maps.
As such, the municipal body in Ambala has about 1,000 safai karamcharis and about 150 office staff. These employees are supposed to clean the roads, clear garbage dumps, clean drains etc. every day. However, they get hand in glove with their supervisors and do not report for duty every day, even though the supervisor marks their
attendance.
With the new system in place, an employee is made to register onto the system using his fingerprints, name, contact details, department and the place of work. Once this is done, the supervisors are made to carry the devices to the field to capture the attendance. The employees are then made to mark their attendance; the movement this swipe happens, GPS location from the device is captured and sent along with the swipe details to the server. In the back-end, this attendance is checked for correctness in terms of the right person marking his attendance from the area allotted to him. A successful swipe which captures the person details and is marked from the correct geographical location, is marked as a valid attendance.
The result: the civic body in this Haryana town is able to provide improved civic services in a timely manner.
