CANACONA: It was an unusual sight to find many government employees at the Government Office Complex, Canacona, rushing back to their offices on Wednesday evening and it had nothing to do with any love for their jobs.
Having left their work well before their office hours, the frantic employees were hurrying back to their offices on learning that a vigilance team had been conducting a surprise check on attendance in the offices.
In a surprise check, a vigilance team led by DySP Bossuet D’Silva found that several government employees had already left for the day well ahead of their normal duty hours.
It was about 5.15 pm and the three-member team entered the offices and went about calling for muster roll of the offices situated in government office complex, which also houses the deputy collector and Mamlatdar offices. The team noticed most of the offices with only unoccupied chairs.
According to reliable sources, the vigilance team led by DySP D’Silva had made their presence in BDO at about 3.15 pm and was busy inspecting and collecting documents pertaining to an ongoing investigation of a complaint in regard to irregularity of executed works by Cotigao Panchayat.
Soon after completing their work in BDO, the team at about 5.15 entered other offices situated on the first floor and later entered other offices on the ground and second floor and questioned the absence of staff. They asked for the muster roll of respective offices.
Word soon spread like wildfire that a vigilance team was checking the attendance of the employees and many staffers who had, as usual, already left for the day before office hours, were caught off guard.
Some worried staffers returned to their offices after alighting from the buses and others turned their vehicles and rushed back to their respective offices.
However, some were too late as the three-member team had already collected photo copies of most attendance registers.
Incidentally, it may be noted that most offices in Canacona’s government office complex were installed with bio-metric machine to record staff attendance on the working days some two years ago.
“While many of these bio-metric machines are out of order, the offices fail to utilize even the few working machines and prefer to fall back on attendance register, which many consider as easy to manipulate,” said a source.
The government office complex consists of offices of PWD (water, roads, highway, building), WRD (irrigation), Agriculture, BDO, Excise, Sub-Registrar, Treasury, CPDO among others besides the deputy collector and Mamlatdar.
