SPARSH (System for Pension Administration Raksha)

In News 

• Recently, the Defence Ministry introduced a portal, System for Pension Administration (Raksha) (SPARSH), to directly transfer pension to pensioners.

About System for Pension Administration (Raksha) (SPARSH)

• It is an initiative of the Ministry of Defence which aims at providing a comprehensive solution to the administration of pension to the defence pensioners in line with the vision of the government of India of Digital India, Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) and “Minimal Government, Maximum Governance”.
• It is established with the objective of empowering a Defence Pensioner with regard to his pension account. 
• It will initially cater to the new retirees on roll out and subsequently be extended to cover the existing defence pensioners.
• It will receive pension proposals and make payments centrally. 
  • This will reduce the grievances of defence pensioners.”

Need 

• The need for SPARSH has been felt to obviate and address the current challenges in the pension sanctioning and disbursement process such as
  • Decentralised solution existing in silos
  • Manual intervention in processing
  •  Lack of Centralised information for addressing pensioner queries etc. 

Benefits

• It will interface with all the stakeholders and provide a single source of truth there by ensuring transparency, accountability and ease of doing business through information dissemination and simplification of pension processes through Business Process Re-engineering(BPR) .
• It provides the option to the pensioner to use enabled services for quicker processing of his requests and signing of declarations making his experience a truly paperless and hassle free one.

  Source:TH