The Defence Secretary, Shri Giridhar Armane has urged the stakeholders of System for Pension Administration Raksha (SPARSH), an one stop solution to all pension related activities of Defence pensioners pioneered by Defence Accounts Department, to make it more user friendly. He underlined some problems in migration to SPARSH platform and technical glitches that need to be rectified. He was speaking at the Outreach Programme for Defence Pensioners on System for Pension Administration Raksha (SPARSH) organized by Defence Accounts Department at New Delhi on 14th December, 2022.
Complementing the Defence Accounts Department for executing ambitious project SPARSH with objective of streamlining the entire pension system, the Defence Secretary suggested to make the system intuitively user friendly and provide handholding services to the Defence pensioners in onboarding process. Further, he exhorted the service provider to deploy the best of their resources to the project to ensure the top quality software and seamless transfer of pension and other benefits to the ex-servicemen.
The Defence Secretary virtually inaugurated a SPARSH Service Centre in Delhi Cantonment, offering various services such as Service Requests and Grievance Redressal, Annual Life Certification, Pensioner Data verification (PDV), Manage Profile Changes including Aadhar Number, PAN Number, Postal Address, Bank Details etc , and View and Access various documents such as the Pension Payment Order (PPO), Corrigenda PPO, Pension Slip Form.
The Department also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Six Banks viz. Indian Postal Payment Bank, Union Bank of India, Axis Bank Ltd., ICICI Bank Ltd., Bandhan Bank and Equittas Small Financial Bank Ltd.
The Defence Accounts Department organized the 176th Raksha Pension Samadhan Aayojan, an outreach programme for Pensioners on the SPARSH [System for Pension Administration Raksha]. The Defence Secretary, Shri Giridhar Aramane was the Chief Guest at the function. Vice Chiefs of the Armed Forces, Secretaries and Senior Officials off the Ministry of Defence were also present on the occasion.
The Defence Accounts Department is the nodal implementing agency for Project SPARSH, envisaging ‘whole of the government’ approach and integrates over 3000 pension initiating, sanctioning and disbursement agencies. The unified system brings pensions services ranging from digital process of pensioner verification to real time tracking of grievance redressal at the doorstep of the veterans.