Venkaiah Naidu catches latecomers off guard

At least 80 employees of the urban development and housing and urban poverty alleviation ministries who walked in late on Monday were served with show-cause notices as Union minister Venkaiah Naidu was on a surprise check at Nirman Bhawan.

This was Naidu's second such check in two months. "The minister was very annoyed. He has ordered that show-cause notice be served on latecomers. He also asked us to install biometric attendance system in the ministry," Shankar Agarwal, secretary urban development, said.

He said attendance registers will be withdrawn 15 minutes after 9am, the reporting time, and latecomers will be marked absent and will have to go without pay for the day.

All joint secretaries of the both ministries have been directed to go on checks daily for a week to monitor attendance and identify and take action against chronic offenders.

The office timings are from 9am to 5.30pm with a lunch break of 30 minutes.