Peace On The Pension Front

Come November almost all banks in India witness a familiar scene: that of bunches of oldies – euphemistically called senior citizens to give them a semblance of respectability – crowding their respective bank branches. Sometimes, you would have seen photographs of even invalids arriving at the banks on the shoulders of others during the last two months of the year.

People of the younger generations might wonder why so many old folks at different levels of agility, their heads carrying crops of a variety of grey or, in many cases, devoid of any growth at all, make a beeline to some bank or the other as soon as the Diwali festivities are over.

For the uninitiated, this annual ritual of visiting one’s bank during this period of the year is a vital official requirement. Once a year, all government pensioners must prove to the satisfaction of the pension disbursing bank that they are alive, so that their pension can continue for the following year.

The need for such annual verification of life – officially called the Life Certificate – cannot be overemphasised. If not done, there are possibilities of heavy loss of public funds.

But I wonder why the particular timing – November (October for the Octogenarians) to December. Is there any study to show that most pensioners cash in their chips during these months like trees shedding their dry and lifeless leaves during the “fall” which is usually during the last three months of the year? Perhaps, the government presumes that if they are still kicking then the tenuous link between life and death might last another year.

Whatever it is, all retirees know about this annual pilgrimage and they religiously line up to declare (a) that they are alive; (b) that they were/were not re-employed by the government during the previous year; and (c) they have not remarried. Then they are supposed to sign the form in the presence of the designated official in the bank, or elsewhere.

Even those retired officials who live abroad, have to submit such a declaration and get an acknowledgement of the “Life Certificate” from the nearest Indian Embassy, or a camp office opened near their residences for this purpose, so there is no interruption in their receiving pension.

A few years ago, the process was lengthy, and it took more time as the information was fed into the system manually. Technology made it extremely easy and one just had to fill out and submit the prescribed form. The data was immediately transferred into the profile of the pensioner and that was it. During the last two occasions, the process was over in less than two minutes and soon an SMS confirmed that I would continue to receive my pension as usual.

This year, however, my bank has introduced an additional layer of verification of the pensioner’s identity, no matter whether the fellow is a customer of the same bank and branch whose entire profile is available at the clique of a button of the computer. The pensioner must prove that he is the same person through his biometrics, basically matching fingerprints.

While the first two persons in the queue sailed through the procedure, the third gentleman had a problem with a mismatch of his fingerprints, read by the small equipment and transmitted to the Aadhaar database for verification. No amount of changing to a different finger or de-greasing, wiping of the fingers, etc., could make the fingerprints match with the data.

The bank official kept trying with the other hand. The result was the same.

Meanwhile, the rest of us in the line were fidgeting, although the same fate could as well be awaiting us. The person who ‘failed’ the test was asked to step aside and wait a while, while the official took care of the others behind him. After some five minutes, he called the gentleman and handed him the “acknowledgement” of receipt of his Life Certificate. Along with the person in question we all were relieved. There was, thus, an alternative to matching one’s fingerprints to verify one’s identity.

When asked why the ‘alternative method’ was not tried immediately after the ‘authentication’ with fingerprints failed, and better still, why the fingerprint verification was at all necessary, the answer was, “That’s the procedure.”

This is a major problem with how we do things. Before introducing a new procedure, we do not consider why it is necessary nor anticipate the difficulties it may create for the end-users. And the underlings apishly carry out the procedure.

Later, when I learnt that most other banks were not insisting upon this method of verification, I thought perhaps some fertile brain in my bank thought of this new pin-prick to derive some pleasure out of it at our expense.

I noticed and learnt something else too. The government’s announcements to make the system smooth for all do not percolate down to those counters where officials dispense services to the people.

For example, the bank official today asked the gentleman, whose biometrics were causing trouble, to produce his Aadhar Card. When he did so, the official wanted the full Aadhaar number, not the masked card showing only the last four digits. If that indeed was indispensable, why did the government announce that a masked Aadhaar card was enough? That is a mystery.

To me, this whole exercise was entirely avoidable. After all, when we present a cheque at the bank to draw money, even a large sum, the teller simply opens my profile on the computer, matches my signature, checks that the account has enough funds to cover the amount sought to be withdrawn, gets another signature on the obverse of the cheque leaf and that is it. The money is counted and handed over. No matching of fingerprints, no other verification is insisted; the signature is enough.

That should also be adequate to satisfy the bank that one is alive so long as the applicant, who is the holder of the pension account, is present before the bank official and signs the form in his presence. I am sure that for this particular purpose, all banks serve their customers only. Where, then, is the problem?

Anyhow, at the end of the fun, all of us who had visited our bank on a balmy Saturday morning, perfect for an outing in natural surroundings, successfully proved to the entire satisfaction of the bank that we were all alive. We can now hope to have some peace on our pension front until at least next November. Till then, I wish all fellow pensioners a most enjoyable life ahead!

Sandip Mitra retired from the Indian Foreign Service. Views expressed here are the writer’s own.