Maharashtra government to join Centre's biometric-based pension scheme

In a major relief for pensioners and their families, the Maharashtra government has decided to participate in the Centre's Jeevan Pramaan scheme, which enables the beneficiaries to submit digitised, biometric life certificates.

Finance minister Sudhir Mungantiwar recently granted his approval for joining the scheme, which will make things easier for pensioners by reducing modalities in the grant of pension. They have to provide life certificates to pension disbursing agencies, such as banks, on an annual basis, and have to present themselves personally before the bank officials or get the certificate issued by the department where they had served and deliver it to the bank. This causes inconvenience to pensioners, especially to those who are unwell, confined or have settled elsewhere.

The Maharashtra government has around 6 lakh pensioners in addition to around 2 lakh pensioners of various zilla parishads. They have to provide life certificates between November 1 and 30.

The biometric-based Jeevan Pramaan digital life certificate scheme will make it easier for pensioners to get these certificates. The Aadhaar-linked system will enable pensioners to scan their iris or fingerprints to certify that they are alive and cut down on unnecessary procedures.

"The in-principle approval has been granted. Now the National Informatics Centre (NIC) will decide on the modalities and the procedure to grant these digital life certificates and will work on the back-end software too," said a senior finance department official. The life certificates can also be electronically delivered to the pension disbursing agency without any human intervention, he added.

He said the biometric scanning facilities could be made available in banks, government offices, citizen service centres (CSCs) and Sangram centres, which have been set up in gram panchayats, dedicated Jeevan Pramaan centres or even from the comfort of ones' home in case the pensioner had the necessary hardware and software. For this, the pensioners will voluntarily have to seed their Aadhaar numbers with their pension and bank database and provide their biometric details. The official added the facility was likely to be activated in the coming year.