Under the aegis of Dr. Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State for Personnel, PG and Pensions, to enhance “Ease of Living” of pensioners and family pensioners, Department of Pension & Pensioners Welfare, Government of India has taken a number of welfare measures in pension policy as well as in digitization of pension related processes. There have been a number of amendments in the pension rules and several clarificatory orders/ instructions have been issued during the last 50 years. These have been consolidated and brought out as Central Civil Service (Pension) Rules, 2021 in December, 2021.

Since the major Pension Disbursing Authorities are banks, the Department of Pension and Pensioners’ Welfare has started a series of Awareness Workshops for Central Pension Processing Centers (CPPCs) of Banks as well as their field functionaries handling pension related work in the bank. For this purpose, a Central Government Team led by Shri V. Srinivas, Secretary, Department of Pension and Pensioners’ Welfare is at Srinagar to conduct a workshop for the officers of State Bank of India tomorrow.

The objective of these workshops is to spread awareness of the various rules and procedures relevant for Pension Disbursing Banks and also the steps being taken by Government of India to ensure “Ease of Living” for Pensioners. The workshop shall also focus on the issues faced by Bank officials in handling these processes and pensioners’ grievances and note any suggestions forwarded by the Bank officials.

The workshop for officers of State Bank of India is being held on 10^th & 11^th July, 2023, at Winter Hall, Sher-i-Kashmir International Convention Center, Srinagar, J&K. More than 50 officers from CPPCs and pension dealing branches of State Bank of India are participating in this workshop.  Bankers’ Awareness workshops, on similar lines, will be conducted in collaboration with other Pension Disbursing Banks in 2023-24. The workshop is also expected to firm up a road-map towards integrating 17 banks with the single-window Integrated Pensioners’ Portal of DoPPW with the objective of providing pensioners with a host of services related to pension and banking. Dr Jitendra Singh has inaugurated integration of SBI pension seva portal with Integrated Pensioners Portal in October, 2022.

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