Proving myself alive

If anyone were to ask me how I spent the last week of November '21, I would say that I was trying to prove that I am alive. The events that led up to this state of affairs are quite intriguing. I quit my job prematurely in July '21. As a Central Govt employee, I could've gone on for about a year and a half more. There were big changes coming in the workplace. I neither had enough time left to be part of the change nor the drive to drive the change. Since I had reached a somewhat senior position in the great Indian bureaucracy, accommodating me in the midst of changes would have been a tough call for employers and would be an unpleasant experience for me also. So here I am spending my days reading, dabbling a little bit in the stock market, playing the guitar (ever so rarely) and playing with our pet dog kuttan, who was rescued off the streets

      I get a pension from the Government at the end of the month. About a month and a half into retirement, I started getting my pension. I was told that it used to take three months in the cases of employees who take voluntary retirement. The new reforms of digital processing of Defence pensions through a portal called Sparsh (Touch in Hindi), it was processed super fast. With my frugal lifestyle, the pension is more than enough to sustain me. I have no debt and we own a mortgage-free apartment to live. The Missus is still employed. Although she regularly threatens to quit. Our son Vasudev (aka Chathu) has a job in an IT firm in Bangalore and he has been working from our home in Calcutta/Chennai for the last one year and more. He also regularly threatens to quit. 

    There is a system called Life Certificate in Government. This is a process by which the pensioner presents himself before a Bank and signs a certificate stating that he is alive and for the Banker to certify that he has indeed seen the pensioner alive . I was very happy to learn of the new reforms that involved digital process of generating Life certificate without elderly pensioners having to visit the Bank. This meant generation of Life certificate remotely by digital/ biometric means. The local Post Office/ Banks etc are partners in the process and if we place a request online, they will send a representative to visit your home with biometric readers. I studied the entire process and put in a request to the local Post Office to send the postman with the biometric reader. The postman arrived promptly and my Life certificate was generated. The next day, I received a message from SBI stating  “Dear Pensioner , your pension account registered with Jeevan Pramaan not found with SBI. Please resubmit with correct disbursing agency details”. I requested the postman to come once again. (A nice friendly guy called Rajkumar, who is ever so keen to oblige). I did this all over again but it I got the same message.

The next day I went to the SBI branch from where I draw my pension. I was told by them that in the new cases processed through Sparsh portal, the disbursing agency is not the Bank but the pension sanctioning authority itself. They said that the biometric validation failed because I had entered disbursing agency as SBI. They also said that the validation cannot be done manually for Sparsh cases and it has to be done by biometrics only. They went on to validate my biometric particulars with details entered as they suggested but they did not succeed despite several attempts. It appears that in Sparsh cases, they have no means of acknowledging life certificate manually but only by digital/biometric validation. They expressed their helplessness. I was advised to try video life certificate with SBI.

            Disheartened by the whole experience I went home and tried video Life certificate process by entering details in pension seva portal of SBI on the same day. An error message came stating that my account number is not eligible for Video Life certificate. Finally I discovered a provision to manually upload a Digital Life certificate. After several aborted attempts, I managed to do that, with a little help from colleagues in the Defence Accounts Department. 

I hope that now, finally, the Government is convinced that I am alive and kicking