The Tamil Nadu government has made biometric and Face ID-based attendance mandatory for all officers and staff of its Human Resource Management (HRM) Department at the State Secretariat, effective June 1, 2026.
The directive was issued through an official circular by S. Thankapappa, Deputy Secretary of the HRM Department, acting on instructions from the Principal Secretary to the Government. Under the revised system, employees must record their attendance through biometric authentication, facial recognition, or the existing manual register — with all three running in parallel until further orders. The circular also sets a firm reporting time: all staff must be present and marked by 10 AM.
“The biometric or Face ID attendance system will come into effect from June 1. All officers and staff are requested to attend office before 10 a.m. and ensure their presence through the biometric or Face ID attendance system, in addition to manual attendance, until further orders,” the circular stated.
The move follows complaints from within the Secretariat that a section of employees were failing to arrive on time. Employees have also been directed to wear their official ID cards while on duty — a compliance requirement that was apparently not being uniformly observed. The system was piloted earlier but temporarily paused after some staff raised operational objections. The department said those issues have since been resolved.
The HRM Department is the first at the Tamil Nadu Secretariat to implement the system. Officials confirmed it will be extended to other departments in phases, with the eventual aim of covering the entire Secretariat. Tamil Nadu joins several other state governments and central departments that have adopted digital attendance tools in recent years to address punctuality and proxy attendance concerns.
The rollout does raise questions under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023. Facial recognition data falls within the category of biometric personal data, which the DPDP Act and DPDP Rules 2025 require organisations to collect on a valid legal basis, store securely, and process only for specified purposes. Privacy advocates have flagged concerns about consent, data storage timelines, and oversight — though the government has not publicly addressed whether a DPDP compliance assessment was conducted before the rollout.
The phased extension across the Secretariat will serve as a test case for how public sector bodies in India handle biometric workforce data under the new privacy framework.
