Though there were no bogus employees there, but attendance of employees has dramatically improved. Encouraged by the response, the Uttar Pradesh government has now directed 12 other municipal corporations in the state — Meerut, Ghaziabad, Bareilly, Agra, Aligarh, Kanpur, Jhansi, Allahabad, Lucknow, Gorakhpur, Varanasi and Saharanpur that have over 56,000 employees — to adopt the technology.

“All municipal corporations have been issued directives to install biometric machines to record attendance of employees. It will help the staff to become punctual,” said Alok Ranjan, Principal Secretary of Urban Development. In this biometric attendance system, a staffer has to put his finger on the “reader” when he enters or leaves office. The machine matches it with the fingerprint in its memory and records the time. Since the system is tamper-proof, no mischief is possible.

It was introduced in the MCD headquarters on August 1. Barely a week after the MCD identified bogus employees in November, the MMC purchased 20 biometric attendance machines at a cost of Rs 4.5 lakh which could record the attendance of over 10,000 employees.

“The machines were installed on December 1. In the first month, we found that employees have started reaching office on time,” said B B Banerjee, Additional Municipal Commissioner of Moradabad. He added that bogus employees now cannot remain undetected. At present, MMC employees have to record their attendance when they come to office, but soon, they will also have to record the time when they leave, said Banerjee.