Defence Ministry Signs MoU With BoB, HDFC Bank To Expand Sparsh Initiative
The MoU will engage 7,900 branches of Bank of Baroda and 6,300 branches of HDFC Bank as service centres for pensioners and it will benefit those who live in remote areas and don’t have the facilities to log on to Sparsh
Photo Credit : Ministry of Defence,
Defence Accounts Department signs MoU with BoB and HDFC Bank to provide services under SPARSH initiative
The Defence Accounts Department (DAP) signed a memorandum of understanding with the Bank of Baroda and HDFC Bank to provide services under the system for pension administration (Sparsh) initiative on Wednesday.
Service will be functional across more than 14,000 bank branches throughout India.
Sparsh is an online system for processing pension claims and crediting the pension directly into the bank accounts of defence pensioners without any external intermediary.
Defence Secretary Ajay Kumar said that the objective is to bring 17 lakh pensioners out of the total 32 lakh pensioners onto SPARSH by the end of September 2022 and the remaining pensioners will be brought at the earliest. He claimed that the average time for a pension settlement has come down significantly to about 16 days.
The MoU will engage 7,900 branches of Bank of Baroda and 6,300 branches of HDFC Bank as service centres for pensioners and it will benefit those who live in remote areas and don’t have the facilities to log on to Sparsh, according to the officials.
Service centres will have functions including profile updating, registering grievances and seeking redress and performing annual digital identification and pensioner data verification among others.
