New Delhi, Sep 20 (IANS) The number of retired persons is increasing in the country and we should try and use their energies in a positive manner, said Union Minister Jitendra Singh on Wednesday as he inaugurated the first Pension Adalat and unveiled a mobile app for pensioners here.

“There should be a smooth transition from their active life to retired life. The pensioners should re-orient themselves to the new beginning,” said the Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions .

He added that the government has started a number of reforms to facilitate the pensioners.

A mechanism has been put in place where a pensioner will get Pension Payment Order (PPO) on the day of his retirement, he said.

The Minister also presented the ‘Anubhav Awards’ for this year to 16 pensioners for their contribution “towards creating institutional memory for the departments”.

The mobile app has been created to avail the services of the Pensioners’ Portal.

A pensioner can avail a number of services on it such as checking the date of credit of first pension, action taken, calculating the commuted pension and giving feedback. Under ‘What is New’, the new orders issued by the department will be available.

Addressing the gathering, Singh said that Pension Adalats will help in on-the-spot redressal of pensioners’ grievances. He also appealed to the state governments to implement the good governance measures taken by the Central government.

The Pension Adalats are being convened with the objective of bringing on a common table the aggrieved pensioner, the concerned department, the bank or CGHS representative, wherever relevant, so that such cases can be settled across the table within the framework of extant rules, he said.

In future, the Pension Adalats will also be set up at other places outside Delhi.

Congratulating the recipients of the ‘Anubhav’ Awards, he said that under Anubhav, the retiring employees give an account of their experiences during service which will help improve the government’s functioning.

“These experiences are a great help to the government. These accounts will become a resource for research as well as administrative reference and thus will help in improving the departments’ working,” he said.

The Anubhav scheme was instituted on the call of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to encourage retiring and retired employees to submit their experiences while working in the government with the objective of creating an institutional data base for future reference.

–IANS
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