India’s Controller General of Defence Accounts (CGDA) on Sunday said that a glitch in the government’s new pension disbursing system, which affected hundreds of former servicemen, has been fixed.
The development came two days after Hindustan Times highlighted that several veterans, including three-star officers, were not paid dearness relief (DR) — a vital component of their retirement income — for January 2022 due to the glitch in the system.
The CGDA, which comes under the defence ministry, said DR has been credited into their accounts. It attributed the problem to “errors in banking data.”
“Nearly 5 LAKH monthly pensions successfully disbursed via #SPARSH for January 2022. Dearness Relief (DR) for 1048 veterans, left out due to errors in banking data, has been rectified & paid in less than 48 hours of reporting. Efficient. Effective. Digital,” the CGDA said on Twitter.
Central government employees and pensioners are entitled to DR equivalent to 31% of their basic pay or pension. The glitch meant that retired colonels, for instance, were paid around ₹31,000 less than the usual and former lieutenant generals around ₹37,000 less.
Four former three-star generals confirmed to HT that DR was credited into their bank accounts on Saturday evening.
“I am glad that CGDA has acted swiftly on the HT report and hope no more glitches are in store. However, many of us still feel that there was no need to tinker with the earlier system in which pensions came under the ambit of banks,” said a former lieutenant general.
{{/usCountry}}“I am glad that CGDA has acted swiftly on the HT report and hope no more glitches are in store. However, many of us still feel that there was no need to tinker with the earlier system in which pensions came under the ambit of banks,” said a former lieutenant general.
{{/usCountry}}The pension problems, now resolved, arose after the government switched to a new online pension disbursing system, controlled by the Allahabad-based Principal Controller of Defence Accounts (Pensions), to ease different aspects of defence pensions including initiation, sanction, computation, revision and disbursement.
The system called SPARSH, or System for Pension Administration (Raksha), involves crediting pensions directly into the accounts of former servicemen without relying on any external intermediary (banks). The officers affected were the ones who retired after 2016 as pensioners are being moved to the new system in phases.
According to the PCDA (P), the SPARSH comprehensive pension package, an end-to-end online system, seeks top to ensure “the right payment to the right pensioner at the right time through digital processing” of the pensions of more than three million defence pensioners.
The PCDA (P) says the need for SPARSH was felt to obviate and address the existing challenges in the pension sanctioning and disbursement process such as “decentralised solution existing in silos, manual intervention in processing and lack of centralised information for addressing pensioner queries.”