Veterans continue to grapple with pension issues

Veterans continue to grapple with pension issues

PUNE: Defence minister Manohar Parrikar's latest assurance of resolving issues related to revised pension according to the One Rank One Pension (OROP) scheme within two months seems to have hardly reassured the ex-servicemen in the city.

Leave aside OROP, effective from July 1, 2014, many of these ex-servicemen find themselves trapped in the bureaucratic rigmarole of establishing their credentials such as qualifying service and rank weightage to be eligible to get even the pension last revised on January 1, 2006. They continue to get a pension effective before 2006.

Captain Shreepad N Dongre, who retired from Indian Army in 1987 after 25 years of service, said, "I am getting a basic pension of Rs13,850 per month plus a dearness allowance (DA) at 125% of basic pension. I should have been getting Rs16,145 basic pension from January 2006 and Rs17,010 from July 2014 as per OROP."

Dongre has been struggling with the authorities for quite some time for finalization and actual disbursal of the revised pension with arrears. "After repeated follow-ups, they have now fixed my revised pension at Rs15,350 from January 2006 and Rs15,945 from July 2014 but they are not correct considering my service and rank weightage. I am still to get even this wrongly revised pension as the Centralized Pension Processing Centre (CPPC) of the State Bank of India, where I hold my pension account, had no details of my qualifying service," he told TOI.

According to Commander (Retired) Ravi Pathak, "OROP is just one part of the issue. We hope it will get resolved soon, now that the Justice L Narasimha Reddy Commission, which looked into the anomalies arising out of OROP implementation, has submitted its report to the government. We would have preferred the government to make the report public.

"The larger issue though, is of the need to take a serious relook into the pension fixation and disbursal system — right from the service headquarters to the defence accounts office and the banks — to make it more efficient and friendly to ex-servicemen pensioners," said Pathak, associated with the Indian Ex-servicemen Movement, a body of individual veterans of the Indian armed forces.

"Inordinate delay in the issuance of Pension Pay Orders (PPOs), errors in them, PPOs and circulars not reaching pensioners in remote and rural areas, absence of computerized database (related to retirees) with the defence accounts and the banks, bureaucratic approach and lack of response to grievances raised by pensioners are just some of the many problems to point out," he said.

Air Force Association (AFA)-Maharashtra's Group Captain (Retired) Suhas Pathak, who has worked extensively in the area of resolution of pension matters of ex-servicemen, said, "I have handled 97,447 cases over the past 10 years, including 16,334 matters involving widows of ex-servicemen. Twice, we have given written representations to the Chief of Army Staff, Controller-General of Defence Accounts and other authorities."

The AFA-Maharashtra is an officially recognized body which scrutinizes complaints form ex-servicemen related to their pension dues and coordinates with the defence accounts, banks, service headquarters authorities and the directorate of air veterans to get these matters resolved, said Group Captain (Retired) Suhas Kelkar.

Usually, the bank finalizes the revised pension amount on the basis of the pension parameters of the ex-serviceman concerned such as qualifying service (actual time served in uniform) and rank weightage, meant for counting a notional service term towards early retirement from armed forces, date of birth and retirement, and type of pension.

These parameters are specified in the PPO issued to the bank by the Principal Controller of Defence Accounts-Pension (PCDA-P). In case of missing details, the bank seeks clarification from the PCDA-P or the latter conveys the same to the bank in cases where the ex-serviceman raises a grievance.

According to Pathak, "Till 2006, the banks would simply go by the authorized pension shown in the PPO. They would calculate the DA applicable on the same and disburse the revised pension to the ex-servicemen concerned. The PCDA-P stopped issuing PPOs for pre-2006 retirees and instead started issuing tables of revised pension for different ranks, for the banks to make calculations for themselves.

"That is where problems started to arise as the banks do not have sufficient database of the retirees and their pension parameters. The staff is not sufficiently trained and qualified to deal with pension matters and there is over-reliance on bureaucratic procedures like not processing a matter till the bank gets a physical copy of any circular related to pension or response to its queries raised with PCDA-P," he said.

"The PCDA-P has not completed digitization of records despite having started the process in 1986. It continues to rely on the old brown-paper, at times moth-eaten, documents whenever there is a query from bank or a grievance from ex-serviceman. After a lot of hue and cry, it has now started issuing PPOs for pre-2006 retirees, but the same contains errors like showing a reduced rank, wife's name changed, date of birth changed or the PPO, after issuance, going to the wrong authority. And then, the PCDA-P authorities do not respond to queries. Even the banks complain about this."

All these issues result in a lot of time-consuming procedure and cause undue anxiety and concern to the ex-servicemen.

Source:TOI