A Bankers' Awareness Workshop was organized under the auspices of Jitendra Singh, MoS (PP), by Department of Pension and Pensioners' Welfare (DoPPW), at Bhopal, on Monday, for officers of Bank of Baroda handling pension related work.
V Srinivas, Secretary,DoPPW, Sanjiv Narain Mathur, Additional Secretary,DoPPW, Bank of Baroda's Executive Director Ajay K Khurana and Purshottam, Chief General Manager, Bank of Baroda also graced the occasion.
A team of officers from DoPPW took various sessions on pension policy reforms & digitization of pension related processes related to Central Government pensioners, with the objective of updating the field functionaries of Bank of Baroda.
Special sessions were organized on Income Tax matters related to pensioners as well as Digital means of submitting the Annual Life Certificates. Causes for pensioner's grievances were analyzed and measures were suggested for ensuring non-recurrence of the same.
Hon'ble Dr.Jitendra Singh, MoS (PP), felicitated pensioners who attended the workshop. He interacted with the participants and stressed the need for adopting digitization for pension related processes and submission of Digital Life Certificates to enhance Ease of Living of pensioners.
He underlined the importance of adopting procedures to ensure that pensioners do not face any inconvenience for which integration of Banks' Pension Portals with the Integrated Pensioners' Portal would be a big step ahead.
Ajay K Khurana, Executive Director, Bank of Baroda, while addressing the audience at the workshop said, "Pensioners are our most valuablecustomersand Bank of Baroda is committed to provide the best customer service to them and recognize the valuable contribution made by pensioners in building our nation. Currently we have a dedicated team at the Bank's Centralised Pension Payment Centre (CPPC), which is monitored by a nodalofficer. Bank of Baroda's CPPC handlesover two lakh pensioners."
Discussions were held for linking of Integrated Pension Portal developed by DoPPW with the existing portals of BOB to provide seamless services to pensioners. Awareness of field officials and pensioners is of utmost importance to ensure implementation and usage of the benefits of Government of India's welfare measures. The importance and benefits of Digital Life Certificate and Face Authentication technology were discussed with a view to provide widespread publicity to the same as these would be a game changer for pensioners and banks in submission of life certificates. The Awareness Workshop served as a huge capacity building exercise for bank officials.
This workshop was the first such Awareness Workshop for Central Pension Processing Centers and field functionaries handling pension related work in Bank of Baroda. Some pensioners drawing pension from BOB also attended the workshop for an interactive session with DoPPW and BOB. It is expected that through these workshops, the objective of enhancing 'Ease of Living' of pensioners will be achieved to a great extent.
On similar lines, awareness workshops will be conducted in collaboration with other Pension Disbursing Banks in the year 2023-24.