Chandigarh
Come New Year and all 4,000 field employees of the Chandigarh municipal corporation will be under strict monitoring.
The municipal corporation will provide the employees with GPS-enabled wrist watches from January 15 onward. This is a one-of-its-kind project of the civic body to keep a tab on employees at work.
Each field employee will compulsorily wear the hand gadget during their duty hours.
The watches will enable e-marking of the working space for each employee with daily attendance recorded once they reach the areas assigned to them.
Panels in the control room, to be set up in the MC office, will blink if they move out of this space during duty hours. The central server will also be alerted if the staffer tries to remove the watch during duty hours.
Commissioner KK Yadav, who reviewed the project on Tuesday, said that he has asked all departments to submit the lists of all field employees and their working areas positively by December 24.
He said that the firm hired to supply GPS-enabled watches will record entries of each of these employees and their working location on their internal software and then sync it with the GPS watches.
“The supply (of watches) will begin from January 15 and by January end all field employees will have these watches,” he said.
Those under the MC’s watch include 2,400 safai karamcharis (sanitation workers), 1,000 work munshis and 600 gardeners besides labourers in various departments.
‘STRICT ACTION’
Yadav said that those found not wearing the watches will face strict action.
In August, the Chandigarh Sweepers’ Union had met Yadav, asking him not to buy these watches.
Yadav had categorically declined their demand and told them that MC was within its domain to streamline the working of its field employees.
MC took the decision to buy additional watches in July after over 600 safai karamcharis were found absent on duty during an inspection drive. Some of the watches were even found damaged.
Just recently, 200 employees found to be working in residences of councillors and officers were withdrawn and moved to field duties.
Panchkula MC, which has also procured these watches, has started penalising workers who are found absent on duty. tags
