Government of India employs several thousand officials working across Ministries, Departments and various organizations under itself. The management of attendance of the employees is a complex but necessary task, since the presence of officials in offices directly impacts productivity and efficiency. Traditionally, attendance has been managed through registers where officials mark their attendance upon arrival in office. However, supervision of this system is difficult and is also liable to incorrect information being entered into the system. Late arrival and early departure of employees is a common occurrence across organizations. This creates a situation where the sincere and punctual employees feel discouraged and dis incentivized.

Following features are envisaged for Common Bio-metric attendance System:

• This Biometric Attendance System is based on Aadhaar Authentication (Fingerprint and Iris Based Authentication).
• It is an attendance system with real time monitoring
• The system has comprehensive MIS
• This is a lightweight system which does not requires any special hardware or algorithm
• It is compatible with multiple platforms (Windows, Android, etc.) and form factors (Laptop, Desktop and Tablets, etc.)
• Robust System -Self sustained for small power cuts as it uses tablets at the frontend.
• Time taken to Record Attendance is as low as 1-2 Seconds on Wi-Fi and 8-11 Seconds on GPRS (SIM) On-boarding Manual for Biometric Attendance System| 2014 10
• System is tightly integrated with the communication channel of SMS. A user gets SMS’s from the systems at various levels like after registration, on non -marking of attendance and other conditions to empower the users of the system.
• The System has an in-built leave management system wherein an employee can be marked “on leave so that the system recognizes h im/her as on leave and does not send a late attendance SMS.
• The system maintenance is largely automated. Examples are: centralized monitoring of devices –through a dash-board, push-based updating of software on devices and PCsover the air, automatic fallback on SIM based connectivity once the Wi-Fi connectivity goes down and centralized scheduling of shut-down of devices during out of office hours. The efforts are on to make the system even smarter in future.