The Minister of State for Defence Shri Jitendra Singh has asked the banks to adopt zero tolerance approach towards the disbursement of pension to armed forces personnel and improve responsiveness of their branches to pensioners’ grievances. Presiding over a meeting of major banks dealing with pension disbursement of defence pensioners, representatives of the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Defence here yesterday, the minister exhorted the banks to utilize IT solutions for ensuring timely and accurate payment of pension as well as flow of pension related information to the pensioners and the pension accounting organization i.e. CGDA.

In the meeting, issues related to delayed payment of pension to Defence pensioners, restoration of Commuted pension, timely payment of Gratuity etc were discussed. It was also observed that the pensioners are facing difficulties in some banks in getting their due on time. Hence, banks have been directed to be sensitive to the needs of pensioners and have multiple counters, giving priority to the needs of defence pensioners. Banks were also asked to have relationship managers to liaise with such pensioners. Ministry of Finance (Banking Division) agreed to issue further directives to the banks for streamlining the pension payments.

It was also observed that the response of the banks to the SANGAM project launched by CGDA for facilitating revised Pension Payment to defence pensioners has not been very encouraging. The CGDA and banks have agreed to rework the CGDA formats for enabling monitoring of progress of the revised pension payments.

The Department of Ex Servicemen Welfare, Ministry of Defence is handling pension policy matters of about 22 lakh Armed Forces pensioners.