‘Pension Samvad’, a digital window for retired govt officials to resolve issues from home comfort

“I joined this office in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. While everybody was falling ill, I saw pensioners, these senior citizens, coming to office physically from far-off districts. The reason was that in the first wave of the pandemic, the pension finalisation had been impacted,” said Jaya Bhagat, Principal Accountant General (A&E)-1, Maharashtra.

The office jurisdictions includes 17 districts, encompassing Pune, Nasik and Konkan divisions, Mumbai city and suburbs. The primary responsibility of the office is finalising finance and appropriation accounts, and authorising the pension of state government employees. When an employee nears retirement, the department concerned finalises the pension and then it comes to the Principal Account General’s office for checks and correctness of the calculation.

The office authorises the pension and issues a pension payment order, based on which the Treasury office starts the pension. The office maintains around 5 lakh life pension accounts and 1.16 lakh GPF (government pension fund) accounts of state government employees. Along with state employees, the office also authorises pension for IAS, IPS, forest service officials, MLAs, MLCs, High Court judges and freedom fighters.

“Considering all the problems, we started this bouquet of services which we call ‘pension at your doorstep’,” said Bhagat. One of the services was giving dropbox facility through the Pension Sewa Patra and GPF Sewa Patra, wherein pensioners/subscribers can submit their queries either through an online or physical drop box.

It was started on April 15, 2021, and till October 10 this year, nearly 21,266 pensioners have benefited through this.

Realising the issue of digital divide, the office then introduced a voice-mail service from June 6, 2022, through which the issues faced by pensioners were recorded. Around 782 voice mail requests on 020-71177775 were received. A toll free number – 1800220014 – was also started from May 4, 2022, where almost 2,000 pensioners registered themselves.

“All this links to the primary initiative, which is called Pension Samvad, started from March 2022,” said Bhagat. Under this, a pensioner can register with the office for an interaction either through a phone call, WhatsApp message or zoom video call.

Initially, the interaction was held monthly but now it is being held weekly, on every Friday.