Centre clarifies on non-disbursement of pension to Armed Forces personnel

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) on Wednesday issued a clarification regarding the concerns raised in sections of media over non-disbursement of pension to defence pensioners for the month of April 2022.

In its clarification, the Ministry said the Defence Accounts Department is undergoing a major transformation to bring transparency and efficiency in various processes and procedures.

With the broader agenda of digitisation and modernisation of legacy systems, the System for Pension Administration (Raksha) (SPARSH) as an initiative of the Ministry of Defence was envisaged to provide a comprehensive solution to the administration of pension to the defence pensioners in line with the Government’s vision of Digital India, Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) and Minimum Government, Maximum Governance.

Accordingly, all pensioners need to complete annual identification in order to continue receipt of monthly pension, which is usually done in the month of November 2021 by all banks acting as Pension Disbursing Agencies. The Government had extended the window for annual identification upto March 31, 2022 due to Covid-19. SPARSH has been successfully disbursing monthly pension to over five lakh pensioners, including 4.47 lakh pensioners migrated from legacy system to SPARSH (post 01.01.2016 retirees) upto March 31, 2022, PIB said in a release.

However, during the processing of pension for the month of April 2022, it came to light that annual identification of around 3.3 lakh pensioners was not updated. Subsequently, a list was shared with all pension disbursing banks to share updated identification data, if any, and as a result identification status of more than 2.65 lakh pensioners was updated on SPARSH by April 25, 2022 leading to successful processing of pension for all these pensioners. However, banks (the previous Pension Disbursing Agency) could not confirm identification for 58,275 pensioners and neither was their identification received directly on SPARSH by the time of monthly closing.

Hence, these pensioners were not paid their April pension by April 30, 2022. “In order to avoid hardship to such pensioners, a one-time special waiver has been accorded to these 58,275 pensioners to get their identification done by May 25, 2022. The pension for the month of April 2022 has now been processed and pension is due to be credited by end-of-day on May 04, 2022. All such pensioners are being informed about pending annual identification through SMS and email,” the released added.