Challenge

CGDA wanted a centralized pension management portal for defence retirees and civilians. 

Defence Accounts Department (DAD) headed by the Controller General of Defence Accounts (CGDA), India, manages the pension sanction and disbursement for ex-defence personnel.

The existing process relied on legacy systems, which lengthened the iterative pension sanction process causing inordinate delays. The entire mechanism was fairly fragmented, with the payment to nearly three million pensioners being done through more than 1,500 payment agencies.

The absence of a centralized repository led to data inaccuracies which often resulted in under or overpayment of pension. There were also the problems of delayed closure of accounts and the probability of ghost pensioners.

Collating data pertaining to sanction and payment for decision-making was onerous considering the multiple stakeholders involved in the process. 

TCS Solution

TCS’ DigiGOV™ portal ensured transparent and timely pension disbursements

Leveraging its DigiGOV framework as the base platform, integrated with reusable components, TCS built an end-to-end pension sanction to payment solution as part of SPARSH (System for Pension Administration (Raksha)). It is a single digital platform catering to all the three categories of defence personnel and civilians. This platform offers breakthrough transformation features such as auto-detection of tampered data and re-authorization, auto-routing of cases and documents, auto re-computation and revision of entitlements. Key features include:

• Parallel processing of pension administration

• An automated system for sanction generation

• A pensioner data verification process to enable pensioners to view their details over the portal before the culmination of sanction and issuance of pension order

• Event-based notifications and real-time dashboard on a dedicated pensioner portal

• Provision for simulation feature leveraging the pension rules

• Transition toward centralized disbursement through RBI E-Kuber

Benefits

CGDA has brought a smile to millions of defence pensioners in India

TCS’ DigiGOV-based portal has yielded a range of benefits such as:

• Reduced cycle time of the entire sanction process, from over 18 months to less than one month

• Drastic reduction in pensioner grievances

• 100% precise tracking and aging of every claim 

• Precise expenditure figures based on available historical data, bringing more accuracy in the budgeting and revision exercise

• Daily reconciliation and closure of accounts (helps reduce three weeks of delay)