After draining lakhs of rupees from the public exchequer, the Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) has finally admitted its GPS smartwatch attendance system for sanitation workers was a colossal failure.
Launched under the Smart City banner, the watches were supposed to track over 8,000 workers and link salaries to actual cleaning routes. Instead, they became a mockery of accountability. Workers simply left the devices at pan shops, handed them to friends, or kept them idle at home—yet still “clocked” as present. The hardware itself was laughably outdated, with weak GPS chips and low-RAM processors that routinely crashed. Despite this, NMC kept burning ₹16.56 lakh every month—₹207 per unit—for useless data and fake logs.
Now, after years of waste, the civic body has woken up. A month-long trial in Dharampeth zone tested a face-recognition mobile app on workers’ own smartphones. The difference was stark. The app forces real-time face scans at check-in points, locks location permissions, and flags VPN tricks instantly. Workers must also upload geotagged, timestamped photos of sites throughout their shift, creating indisputable proof of work. Route maps highlight idle periods and detours, plugging the very gaps that sank the smartwatch project.
The plan is to roll out this app across all 10 zones and finally drag the system into credibility. But one question lingers—will technology outsmart the workers, or will workers once again outsmart technology?
Either way, the GPS watch fiasco stands as a costly lesson in how bad planning and weak oversight can turn “smart” governance into a dumb waste of taxpayer money.
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