Following in the footsteps of the home ministry, the rural development ministry is set to introduce biometric attendance for its staff and officers to deter the late comers.

The rural development ministry floated a tender for the purchase/installation/monitoring of biometric attendance monitoring system on August 16. The equipments would be installed at Krishi Bhavan, state emporia building at Baba Kharak Singh Marg, and CGO complex; all of which house different departments of the ministry.

Once installed the equipments will keep a tab on all the 600 staff officers of the ministry. According to the tender documents, each biometric machine should have storage capacity of more than 3000 fingerprints, with battery backup of at least 24 hrs and in built TCP/IP connectivity. The system should be based on the both smart cards as well as fingerprints. It should have a capacity of record storage of 60000 records. The selected firm will be required to collect the data/fingerprints of all the staff/ officers of the department of rural development and accordingly install the system.

The firm will be responsible for monitoring the attendance of all the staff/officers of the department and submitting of the attendance report on a daily weekly and monthly basis. The period of monitoring of attendance will be initially for a period of one year which may or may not be extended depending upon the service/performance of the firm. The deadline for submission of the technical and financial bids for interested firms is September 2.