14 December 2022

The Defence Accounts Department organised the Raksha Pension Samadhan Aayojan (RPSA), an outreach programme for Pensioners on the SPARSH [System for Pension Administration Raksha].

The Defence Secretary Shri Giridhar Aramane, IAS was the Chief Guest at the function which included the participation of OSD (Secretary), National Security Council Secretariat Vice Admiral SPS Cheema PVSM AVSM NM, Secretary Ex-Servicemen Welfare Shri Vijoy Kumar Singh, IAS, Financial Adviser (Defence Services) Smt Rasika Chaube, IDAS, along with Senior Officers from the Armed Forces, Secretaries and Officers of the Ministry of Defence and the office of Controller General of Defence Accounts.

Defence pensioners association and pensioners attended the function which has been organised across the country from time to time to resolve the various grievances of the Defence Pensioners.

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 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 event saw the inauguration of the SPARSH Service Centre in Delhi Cantonment by the Chief Guest at Brar Square near the Base Hospital, which will offer 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.

• View and Access various documents such as the Pension Payment Order (PPO), Corrigenda PPO, Pension Slip, Form ­ 16.

Transformational change is possible only through incremental innovation. This web-based system processes pension claims and credits pension directly into the bank accounts of defence pensioners without relying on any external intermediary.

The Defence Accounts Department has been the nodal implementing agency for Project SPARSH, which is envisaged on a ´whole of the government´ approach, which carefully integrates over 3000 pension initiating, sanctioning and disbursement agencies and brings pensions services right to the doorstep of the veterans ­ from digital process of pensioner verification to real time tracking of grievance redressal.

Event Press Release: Click here