SPARSH: Defence pensioners should welcome it, not be sceptical

By Amit Cowshish

It is legitimate for persons retiring from the civil or military service to expect that their pension will be accurately calculated and sanctioned on time, lump sum of gratuity and commuted value of pension will be paid immediately on retirement, monthly pension too will be paid on time, and any grievance that they may have at any stage before or after retirement will be promptly addressed.

Is this happening? Perhaps not, but to pooh-pooh every effort being made to improve the system can be very discouraging for those who are tirelessly working to meet the pensioners’ expectations -no easy task by any standards considering their numbers and the complexity of the pension structure.

This is what happened earlier this month when the pension pay out to 58,758 defence pensioners for the month of April was ‘delayed’ by three days. These pensioners were among 4.79 lakh pensioners ‘migrated’ by the Defence Accounts Department (DAD) to the System for Pension Administration Raksha (SPARSH) which already covers the current retirees and will ultimately cover all the 33-odd lakh ‘legacy’ pensioners whose pension was sanctioned before SPARSH was implemented.

There was an angry outburst on social media. Some commentaries also appeared in the print and electronic media. The anger was understandable, but the narrative built around the putative delay and the apprehensions expressed by the commentators weren’t. It was wrongly assumed by them that the delay was because of some fundamental flaw in the SPARSH software or a technical glitch in the system, neither of which was correct.

SPARSH is an automated pension sanction-cum-disbursement system, centrally administered by the Principal Controller of Defence Accounts (Pensions), or PCDA(P), which has functioned from Prayagraj ever since the erstwhile Controller of Military Accounts (Pensions) was shifted there from Lahore after partition.

While the reasons why the pension pay out was delayed are important and have been amply elucidated in an earlier commentary on this website, it is more important to allay the fear that grips a section of the pensioners: that SPARSH will make life more difficult for them, particularly for those who are not computer-savvy or live in rural areas with limited access to the internet.

SPARSH makes no difference to the way the legacy pensioners have been drawing their pension or to the current retirees as regards the sanction and payment of their pension. The facility available to them to choose the bank for receiving pension pay outs continues unhindered. They do not have to do anything to continue to receive monthly pay outs they have been receiving so far.

Every time a pension is sanctioned to a current retiree, or a legacy pensioner migrates to SPARSH, a personal pension account is automatically created by the system. This can be accessed by the pensioners with the help of the login and password sent to their registered mobile numbers and email accounts.

The personal pension accounts display the pensioners’ profile, element-wise breakdown of the sanctioned pension, facsimile of pension documents like the Pension Payment Order (PPO) and any changes made therein by way of a corrigendum, monthly pension payment details, and the status of any grievance they may have submitted online, which can also be tracked by pensioners without logging into the personal accounts.

Detailed information about sanction of pension or any other entitlement, and monthly pension pay out, is not only reflected in the personal account of the pensioners but intimation is also sent to their registered email, and simultaneously a laconic SMS alert is also sent on their registered mobile numbers.

What is important for the current and legacy pensioners to know is that there is no operation that they must necessarily perform on the SPARSH portal for sanction of their pension, its revision, and disbursement. In fact, there is no need for any pensioner to log into her/his account, not even for submitting the Life Certificate, which every pensioner -civil or military- must submit annually for the pension pay out to continue.

A Life Certificate is intended to ensure that the monthly pension does not continue to be automatically credited to the bank account of a pensioner who may have died since the last time the certificate was submitted by her/him. This certificate can be submitted by the pensioners using the Department of Pension and Pensioners’ Welfare’s Jeevan Praman Face Application on their Android phones.

The pensioners also have the option of visiting any of the 4.5 lakh Common Service Centres (CSCs) of the Ministry of Electronic and Information Technology for any pension-related assistance. These centres are located across the country right down to each Gram Panchayat for providing a wide range of services, including submission of the Life Certificate.

More than 800 branches of the State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank, 161 offices of the DAD, and some other designated service centres (DSCs) also provide this service. More banks are expected to pitch in. Location of the CSCs and DSCs can be searched on the SPARSH portal.

How can these facilities that SPARSH offers inconvenience the pensioners? If anything, the newly instituted system will only make sanction and disbursement of pension more efficient, if for no other reason than that it eliminates the need for the current retirees and legacy pensioners to personally visit any office for sanction or disbursement of pension.

Instead of three offices which functioned as the Pension Sanctioning Authorities (PSA) before implementation of SPARSH, PCDA(P) will now be the only PSA for all defence pensioners. This is how it used to be till the early 1980s when, for reasons which do not matter now, the authority to sanction pension to the officers and personnel of the Indian Air Force and Indian Navy was transferred from PCDA(P) to the DAD offices at New Delhi and Mumbai respectively.

The PCDA(P) will also be the sole Pension Disbursing Authority (PDA) instead of 40,000-odd bank branches and other agencies which functioned as the PDAs, which implies that the monthly entitlements will be worked out centrally by PCDA(P) -an office which specialises in pension matters- using the SPARSH software and remitted to the bank or any other agency opted for by the pensioners.

The results achieved so far have been encouraging. The average time taken for sanctioning pension for the current retirees has come down from 4 months to just 17 days, for the first payment of gratuity and commuted value of pension from one month to 1-2 days, and grievance redressal from 30 days to merely 3-4 days. The naysayers must reassess their opposition to SPARSH as it does not inconvenience -occasional hiccups notwithstanding- but actually make life much easier for the 33-odd lakh existing pensioners and more than 85,000 who retire every year.

(The author is Former Financial Advisor (Acquisition), Ministry of Defence. Views expressed are personal and do not reflect the official position or policy of Financial Express Online. Reproducing this content without permission is prohibited).