Digital Life Certificate for Pensioners

In another big relief to the common man, India’s honourable prime minister Shri Narendra Modi has launched “Jeevan Praman” scheme by launching digital life certificate which would straight away benefit over one crore pensioners. This self certification would be Aadhar based and work as a proof of pensioner’s existence.

Current process to receive pension

At present, submission of life certificate issued by approved authorities or appearing in person is mandatory by every retired employee of various government organisations and public sector units in order to receive pension money. The life certificate has to be submitted to pension disbursing agencies in the month of November every year which also requires verification and attestation by gazetted officer or bank officials. Due to this, the process was very time consuming for the pensioner.

Benefits of Digital Life Certificate – How the process would change now?

Software has been developed to record Aadhar number, biometric details, date and time by the department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY). This application can be downloaded on mobile phone/desktop/laptop. After downloading, user needs to plug the biometric reading device which will record the details of the pensioner. After the details are recorded, they would be uploaded to a centralized database which would then be accessed by the pension disbursing agency. This would act as a proof of pensioner is alive so that they can receive the pension amount.

How to get software application and biometric device

The software application would be available for free whereas biometric reading device would be available at a very low cost.

For pensioners living in rural areas where the software application or internet connectivity is not possible, service centres would be opened.

Do you know Aadhar card is one of the document to open bank account under Jan Dhan Yojana

Latest update on digital life certificate 27Oct2016:

EPFO pensioners can now submit digital life certificates via Jeevan Praman Patra programme. This will help in further improving subscriber’s convenience especially from remote locations. Currently individuals living in remote places have to travel long distances to reach EPFO offices or banks for filing paper based life certificate. Common service centers (CSC) are service delivery points which are broadband enabled.