As per an old saying “You can't teach an old dog new tricks”! But the government of India has decided to change the old habits of their employees. India's bureaucrats have long had a reputation for not sticking to time. In an effort to promote punctuality, biometric scanners have been installed at the offices of the Home Ministry.

From now on thousands of Home Ministry employees will register the time they arrive at and leave from work. A ten-minute delay three times a month will count as one day of leave. This marks the beginning of a drive to change the decades-old work culture of government employees, who have a reputation for arriving late and leaving early.

Home Minister P. Chidambaram said, “I hope that people absorb the spirit and the purpose behind which this system has been introduced. But this is a message to the whole country that everybody must do his work for the allotted time," he said. "I understand flexi time, we will introduce some flexibility, but the flexibility is if you come ten or fifteen minutes late, you have to work another ten or fifteen minutes."

The punctuality drive at the Home Ministry is music to the ears of thousands of people who have become accustomed to patiently waiting for government employees to turn up for duty, and endless delays in processing public documents such as passports. They are hoping other employees of the federal government, a staggering three million, will also have to fall in line.

However sociologists point out that it is not fair to blame just bureaucrats for slack time keeping. Punctuality is not an Indian virtue - whether at the official or social level. It is quite common for trains to run behind time, or for people to turn up late for official meetings. Guests seldom worry if they are hours late for lunch and dinner invitations, and marriage parties are often inordinately delayed.

Among the pieces of advise commonly handed out to foreign businessmen heading to India is not to pack too many appointments in a day, because several could run late.

Interswitch, an electronic transaction and payment processing company, has teamed up with Precise Biometrics, a developer of biometric solutions, to deliver Match-on-Card technology to the African banking industry. The partnership has already yielded one project which provides licenses for the product in 42 billion in Nigerian currency.

The partnership is significant to the banking sectors in Nigeria because the country has passed regulations requiring banks to do away with magnetic stripes for banking cards and instead adopting embedded chip cards.

The Match-on-Card technology from Precise enables banks to utilize biometrics for customer authentication at ATMs without having to store any biometric information. Precise Match-on-Card is in the process of storing and matching fingerprint information on a smart card to establish the physical presence of an individual. As the fingerprint information does not leave the card, there is no need for database or online communication, and the cardholder’s integrity is preserved.

Mr. Mitchell Elegbe, MD/CEO, Interswitch, in a statement said, “Interswitch is pleased to enter into this partnership, as Precise Biometrics is the leading provider of biometric Match-on-Card solutions and we believe that our joint efforts and technological know-how will have great commercial potential in the West African region”.