Misuse of GPS watches meant to track Chandigarh MC employees can't be overlooked: Audit report

Sandeep Rana

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Chandigarh, June 10

Pointing out that there may be “ghost attendance” with regard to GPS-enabled watches meant to track employees, the audit report has stated “misuse of the watches cannot be overlooked”.

This is despite the fact that the Municipal Corporation signed a whopping Rs 6.30-crore contract with Imtac India Pvt Ltd, Karnataka, for a period of three years in December 2019. This amount is only the rent of watches for tracking the location of 4,000 employees during working hours.

“Though there may be increase in attendance, but the fact of misuse of the watches cannot be overlooked. There may be ghost attendance, as there is no effective measure in place to ensure that mere the watch is not at the duty point, but the worker is too present there,” read a report of the UT’s audit wing.

“Reports generated in the system are showing data of comparing mere the attendance of the employees. Data in support of improvement noticed in output/results/quality of work/ efficiency of the worker is not furnished,” it stated. The audit report was supplied by the MC in a RTI reply.

“Why such huge amount of public money was spent on something which serves no purpose. It is a sheer wastage of funds. Rather than this, the corporation should have utilised the amount for some required civic work,” said RK Garg, RTI activist.

MC Commissioner Anindita Mitra said, “Despite the audit objection, we believe that the benefits outweigh any deficiencies in the system. People offline account for absent and on leave as well. The audit objection is regarding its efficacy as it is not linked to attendance (which was a General House decision). However, not just the attendance but location too is being monitored through the watches. Moreover, we are in the process of integrating it with the Integrated Command and Control Centre for monitoring on a real-time basis.”