All the pension related matters of the civil servants are settled through the Pension Department of a State. Pension department is not only responsible for deciding pension cases and issuing authorities like PPO, GPO, CPO, FPPO etc but is responsible also for revising pension cases due to variety of reasons. Needless to say, the proper functioning of Pension System and timely settlement of pension cases is obligatory for Government as well as pensioners due to its various socio-economic impacts.
The Directorate of Pension & Pensioners' Welfare, Jaipur with its five Joint Directorates at Ajmer, Bikaner, Jodhpur, Kota and Udaipur is serving the aforesaid cause for approx. 1,50,000 existing pensioners and average 20,000 new pensioners per annum. Over the years, the workload at these pension offices had increased manyfolds not only due to the increase in new pensioners but also due to the rapid change in pension rules. As a result the timely settlement of pension cases was becoming more and more difficult.
NIC-Pension Project To overcome these problems, Directorate of Pension and NIC Rajasthan State unit joined hands for computerization of the pension cases settlement process. The following major areas were identified for computerization:
Settlement of New Pension cases.
Revising the old pension cases.
Monitoring the settlement of pension cases to avoid delays and irregularities in this process.
Creating a general purpose pensioners database.
Setting up an online enquiry system about the status of a pension case.
For this purpose various software systems have been developed by NIC (All have been developed in ORACLE*RDBMS under UNIX OS) and at present, Pension Directorate & its Joint Directorates are fully operational with online computerized pension systems. The following software are currently running in the pension department:
Pension Information System (PIS) The Pension Information System is aimed at computerizing the core work areas of the Directorate of Pension & Pensioner's welfare Jaipur and its regional offices. The major objectives of this system are to remove delays, inadequacies, tossing of files and other problems related to manual work in calculation and authorization of the various types of pension cases.
The PIS is a large system involving significant efforts in its design and development. Its design follows menu, sub-menu driven structured approach. At the top lies a security menu limiting access to authorised users only. The main menu prompts for selection of case type and pension type, Queries, reports statistical reports and system administration & maintenance modules. The overall process of the settlement of a pension case has undergone a sea change after the implementation of this system. Now a pension case takes an average of 10 days in its finalisation against 30 days taken by the previous manual system.
Pension Monitoring System (PMS) The pension monitoring system (PMS) has been designed to monitor the delays/Pendencies in the disposal of pension cases, generation of monthly progress reports and status reports and also to provide a online enquiry system to the pensioners.
The PMS is a very user friendly and effective file movement progress monitoring system. It has enhanced security features limiting access to authorised users only. Each step in the settlement of the pension case is recorded in the system from receipt of a pension case to final despatch of the case and the persons responsible in the settlement of pension case at different levels also enters their id on each entry. Therefore, it not only gives correct status of the pension case at a particular point of time but also the responsibility of the delay can be fixed effectively.
For further Details, please contact: raghu@rajsu.raj.nic.in