SPARSH - Brig CS Vidyasagar's letter

Dear Sir,

My experience as Director Sainik Welfare, Andhra Pradesh from Nov 2006 to Nov 2012 and as President of TSEWA from Jun 2016 to Jun 2022 and now as a member of TSEWA is that Def Accts Dept will never accept their mistakes. They justify. The irony is that denying pension to Smt Hilda Wilson for three and half years (husband Sepoy Wilson died in May 2019) on some pretext or the other and now they come out with a new excuse that the service no of the pensioner was wrong. The Records Madras Regt has again informed them that the service number is correct. But now SPARSH will come out with some other excuse to deny the pension to the widow. They have no empathy. 

E-PPOs are to be sent by them. To cut down on postal expenses they told the Record Offices to collect them from Allahabad. Now most of the widows approach TSEWA for getting a copy of their husband's E-PPO. They could simply make a provision in their web site if anyone asks for E-PPO there should fields like service no, rank, name in PPO etc to establish authenticity. Then send OTP and if OTP is correct display the E-PPO so that the pensioner can download it and keep it. But this needs putting of E-PPOs of all pensioners for which you need a database and extra work. They do not do their own tasks in hand and how do you expect them to do extra work.

Unless the Def Accts Dept has one third defence civilians, one third serving personnel and one third Ex-Servicemen no improvement can be expected from them due to their work culture.  The standard excuse to deny a legitimate payout is "We are here to save public funds"

So I am going to PCDA (Pensions) Prayagraj to listen to their presentation, capture their MS Power Point slides, listen how they try to tell public how good and easy SPARSH is and all problems are going to be solved in no time. They do not give an opportunity in the seminar to any Ex-Servicemen to represent their grievances.

I am carrying all the requests I received and 33 suggested solutions by TSEWA to improve SPARSH to hand over to the auditors, AOs and AAOs/SAOs who are the masters. IDAS officers are just bystanders as they do not appear to know much of defence pensions. 

If I can get some of the grievances addressed, then only my trip from Hyderabad to Pryagraj is worth the trouble. I have my own doubts. But I will try my level best to bring some changes.

I feel if they give an option of service no, ppo no, aadhaar name (not name) or bank account no to carry out second time authentication (now being done by Aadhaar name which is always different than in PPO) many will be able to see PDV.

warm regards, 

Brig CS Vidyasagar (Retd)