It was a historic moment for the district administration of Dhanbad. It has emerged the 2nd place winner of the prestigious United Nations Public Service Award.
The award was handed over to the district administration on June 23. The award is given for improving the effectiveness, efficiency and quality of public services.
It was given among other things, for the district administration’s initiative called ‘Swavalamban’. This is largely a manual process for disbursement of pensions to the pensioners and registering the new pensioners.
Earlier, when the ‘Swavalamban’ scheme was not in place the process of registering pensioners and disbursement of pension used to be quite “cumbersome, tedious and involved tiring paper works.” It usually took around three months in completing a cycle of payment of pensions. Corruption was all pervasive.
According to the district administration the ‘Swavalamban’ scheme reduced the time from three months to three days. It also reduced the corruption that had marred the pension disbursement in the district.