New Delhi [India], November 21 (ANI): Department of Pension and Pensioners' Welfare has created 25 lakh Digital Life Certificates (DLCs) for Central Government pensioners in 20 days of the nationwide campaign.

These certificates were created during a special campaign organised between November 1 and November 19 in different cities all over India.

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Briefing the media here in the national capital, Union Minister Jitendra Singh informed that the Department of Pension organized "special awareness camps from 1st to 19th November 2022 in different cities all over India from Srinagar in the North to Nagercoil (Kanyakumari District) in the South and from Guwahati in the East to Ahmedabad in the West".

He said that out of 25 lakh DLCs, 2.20 lakhs have been created through face authentication by the latest Face Recognition Technology, thus providing a huge relief, especially to the aged and infirm elderly population.

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Singh said the objective of this nationwide campaign is to promote the use of Face Authentication Technology and DLC thereby ensuring transparency and "Ease of Usage".

"All the registered Pensioners' Associations, Pension Disbursing Banks, Ministries of Government of India and CGHS Centers had been directed to promote the Digital Life Certificate and Face Authentication Technique for giving Life Certificate by organizing special camps for 'Ease of Living' of pensioners, thus setting an example of "whole of government" approach," said the Minister.

Singh informed that the specific cities covered so far are Delhi, Noida, Chandigarh, Mohali, Jammu, Srinagar, Nagpur, Pune, Allahabad, Jalandhar, Gwalior, Thrisur, Madurai, Nagercoil, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Ambarnath (Mumbai), Bhubaneshwar, Balasore, Cuttack, Thiruvananthapuram, and Jaipur.

In the following two weeks, the Minister said this department would conduct 14 more DLC awareness camps in different parts of the country.

Singh said submission of Life Certificates is an important activity to be carried out by pensioners every year in the month of November (with a special provision for pensioners aged 80 years and above to submit their Life Certificates in the month of October) to ensure continuity of their pension.

He said, in the traditional mode, pensioners had to present themselves before the Pension Disbursing Authority for physical submission of their Life Certificate which entailed waiting at the bank branches in queues for this purpose. "This was found inconvenient for the old, ailing and infirm pensioners and further, there was no mechanism for the pensioners to get a status regarding updation of their Life Certificates in the records of the Pension Disbursing Authority," the Minister added.

Singh took pride in stating that the Department of Pension was the first in India to develop a Face Recognition Technology system based on the Aadhaar database in association with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to give Life Certificate from any Android-based smartphone to overcome the challenge of certain pensioners not being able to give DLC due to fading bio-metrics.

As per this facility, the Minister said, the identity of a person is established through the face recognition technique and DLC gets generated.

He added that this breakthrough technology, launched in November 2021, reduced the dependence of pensioners on external biometric devices and made the process more accessible and affordable to the masses by leveraging smartphone-based technology.

The nationwide campaign was conducted by the officials of DoPPW with the help of the State Bank of India (SBI) and Punjab National Bank (PNB), who sponsored the campaign sites. The campaign saw the active participation of registered Central Government Pensioner Associations, the representatives of the Indian Post and Payment Bank (IPPB), the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the National Informatics Centre (NIC) as well as the Controller General of Defence Accounts (CGDA) in every city. (ANI)

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