Govt pensioners are required to submit a life certificate once a year in November to respective public sector banks which pays pension to them. This certificate used to be submitted earlier in a form filled up manually. Few years ago, the govt introduced a digital life certificate called Jeevan Pramaan whereby the bank would fill in the required data, take the pensioners biometric and give them a printout of the generated life certificate.
Since all the data of pensioners was registered on the portal Jeevan Pramaan and the pensioners were also given a Pramaan lD, Govt provided a facility whereby senior citizen pensioners could generate the life certificate at home without having to visit the bank. It said, all that a pensioner is required to do is log in to the website of Jeevan Pramaan, give the Aadhaar No, feed the given OTP and pronto the life certificate would be generated within seconds. What they didn't tell the pensioners is that they need to have a biometric device at home to do so. So pensioners have still to visit the bank and stand in queue at bigger banks like SBI for this purpose. Generating life certificate at home would have been a real help to the the senior pensioners during the pandemic.
Govt should relook at the system, remove the snag and make the facility workable.
RODNEY DE SOUZA, Assagao
