Providing impetus to Digital India initiative, the System for Pensions Administration – RakSHa or SPARSH has disbursed more than Rs 3,090 Crore to Defense Pensioners digitally in the month of August, 2022. In another milestone, 5,62,946 Defence Pensioners migrated successfully onto the digital platform of SPARSH in August 2022. The total number of pensioners onboarded to SPARSH has crossed over the one million mark with 11 lakh beneficiaries, which is nearly 33% of the total defence pensioners in India.
This transformational change has been made possible only through incremental innovations. SPARSH is the web-based system processing the pension claims and crediting the pension directly into the bank accounts of defence pensioners without any external intermediary. It has grown exponentially with more than Rs 11,600 Crores disbursed in the Financial Year 2021-22, from just about Rs 57 crores in FY 2020-21.
The Defence Accounts Department is the nodal implementing agency of Project SPARSH, integrating over 3000 pension initiating, sanctioning and disbursement agencies. It has brought pension services right at the door step of the veterans – from digital process of pensioner verification to real time tracking of grievance redressal.