THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Almost half of the government employees in the state are still in a primitive age for completing the formalities to get their monthly perks. In the era of computerisation when almost all government offices are computerised, about 2.65 lakh employees are still paid salaries through hand-written bills. Though Kerala started a Service and Payroll Administrative Repository for Kerala (Spark) which implemented the project in a time-bound manner in August 2008, only 2.60 lakh employees are paid through computerised bills.Though there is no central data base regarding the number of government employees in the state, it is estimated that there are around 5.25 lakh government employees and this project will be data-based also. Sources said that the teachers of lower primary and upper primary are the worst affected as they are not having computer or internet to update the details in a computer. There are around 70,000 teachers in this category where the bills are being written by a person every month to pay the salaries.However, there is another category, gazetted officers, the majority of whom still depend on the outdated system. The bills of this category are prepared by themselves and they are not ready to shift to the new system. Following the negative attitude, the government issued an order on October 23, 2011 directing all the government offices to implement Spark. It has been directed to complete the data entry by all the departments by December 31, 2011. It was also directed that all salary bills of the employees, payable for February 2012 should be through Spark.The head of the departments will be responsible for complying with the deadline. It is pointed out that the employees are still not aware of the benefits by implementing Spark. Once the data is entered, every month there will only be slight changes to be made in the pay bill, which will help in reducing the work time spent on the bill payments. Now Spark is in the process of electronic submission of bills to treasuries, pension data base maintenance, analysis on pensioners for the next 5-10 years, fully automated bug reporting and tracking system, updating budget allocation for each head of account, generation of sanction orders, TDS and periodical reports, online queries for monitoring expenses, TA bills and even online leave application.
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