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Journalism of Courage
From a spelling error to pension-related impediments and the struggles faced by a bereaved dependent — these figured among issues that forced members to frequent the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) offices in a desperate bid to seek redressal. A couple of outreach programmes launched by the EPFO are now helping members to get their long-pending issues resolved.
Take the case of Sudhakar Chaubey, a cab driver who used to visit the EPFO’s Delhi office over the last couple of years for one issue: a spelling mistake in his father’s name. After his case was taken up in the Samadhan outreach initiative started by the EPFO’s North office in Wazirpur, Delhi, the issue was eventually resolved in quick time. Meanwhile, Rekha (who uses only first name) had paid multiple visits over the last two years to get funds released from the account of her husband, who passed away two years ago, before seeing her issue resolved through the same initiative. As was the case with Mohan Singh, 62, a resident of a village in Uttarakhand, who used to visit the EPFO’s office every month for the last four years to seek help for the issues with his pension claim. Having worked in a hosiery unit from 1990 to 2008, and despite deductions made by his employer from his salary, Singh was unable to access his pension and balance provident fund amount in his EPF account after 58 years of age, and finally got relief through the initiative.
Dedicated counter
Apart from the outreach, the zonal office of EPFO also has a ‘Single Window Death Claim Counter’ — a dedicated counter to address the claims process for deceased family members by streamlining document verification and claim submission. Meanwhile, the Nidhi Aapke Nikat programme, a monthly outreach where EPFO stakeholders can come to the EPFO field offices for grievance redressal, is helping make pensioners and members, especially from the lower strata of society, acquainted with the process of deductions and making them aware of how to check their balance or withdraw funds in times of need.
“There are many instances where EPF contribution has been deducted for the employees but they didn’t know. If the working record was in the 2000s, there is no digital record also. For instance, there was a labourer who had come from West Bengal to work in Gujarat 20 years ago, and had 4 years of deduction, but he didn’t know any details, not even his UAN (Universal Account Number),” a senior government official said. During a Nidhi Aapke Nikat outreach in August, officers found a person who had worked in a pantry at three different organisations, but was not aware about his PF account details. “It was his third job, deductions had happened at all places, but he didn’t know of his PF details. He simply had no clue about his funds with the EPFO. The officer then asked him to provide all details in a form to provide help,” the official said.
On an average now, almost 500 people visit the Wazirpur region office of the EPFO every day to seek help for resolving their issues, which range from spelling errors to mismatch in identification details. And a majority of them tap the redressal window through a token system, as they do not know how to use the digital interface. Many seek help to draw funds as their accounts belong to the paper-era of the retirement fund body.
Samadhan initiative
“We started this Samadhan initiative with daily sessions and face-to-face interactions. We engage with the concerned officers to understand the member’s concerns and provide personalised attention. An officer is then assigned to oversee the case, ensure proper follow up for a prompt and effective resolution. In many cases, it’s just an accounting adjustment, the money belongs to them,” Abhaya Nand Tiwari, Regional PF Commissioner, EPFO North said.
After criticism over the high number of rejections and issues with its online portal, the EPFO has been working towards improving its member-centric services over the last one year. The EPFO has over 30 crore accounts with 7 crore plus active contributing members and a corpus of over Rs 26 lakh crore.
“Last year, there were a large number of IT problems that were plaguing the organisation… Since then we have taken a large number of corrective actions. We onboarded technical experts to improve performance, we upgraded our entire hardware infrastructure, we significantly increased our network bandwidth, software changes were continuously being improved, the entire form 19 and revamped form 13 were introduced. This has had a significant impact on the daily work of EPFO employees and consequently on member services. By the beginning of this year, most of the IT performance issues had largely been resolved,” Ramesh Krishnamurthi, Central Provident Fund Commissioner, EPFO said at the 73rd Foundation Day of the Fund on November 1.
Krishnamurthi said they took help from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to expedite development by C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) to revamp the online systems of the EPFO. “We also focused on going ahead with the large database consolidation and migration exercise…our database is of vintage, we have nearly 123 different databases which we had to consolidate, that was a humongous exercise that we undertook…we focused on process simplification,” he said.
As the EPFO worked towards revamping its systems, Krishnamurthi said it implemented a centralised pension payment system, cheque leaf and bank attestation were removed, employer approval for transfer was removed, joint declaration form was simplified, multiple approvals were done away with, all the members having Aadhaar authentication could make changes themselves, UAN generation using FAT (face authentication technology) was introduced, auto settlement was increased to Rs 5 lakh, instructions were given to ensure that part payment of partial withdrawals could be done even if there was any issue for the balance part and number and levels of approvals were drastically reduced for processing transfer claims.
Last month, the EPFO also streamlined its withdrawal process by reducing the categories for drawing out funds to just three — essential needs (illness, education, marriage); housing needs; and special circumstances from present 13 categories while introducing a minimum 25 per cent minimum balance provision. EPFO had seen a spike in rejection rate for final settlement claims to 33.8 per cent in 2022-23 from 18.2 per cent in 2018-19. The rejection rate for final settlements has improved since to 30.3 per cent in 2023-24, with data for 2024-25 yet to come in.
