CHENNAI: The Employees Provident Fund Organisation’s sub-regional office at Mogappair has disbursed pension for merely 14,000 out of the total of over 30,000 on its registry as on Tuesday, for May, citing “mismatch in names and non-receipt of required documents”.
Pensioners said they were asked to produce documents such as Aadhaar Card, bank passbook and also register their finger prints to resume receiving their pension although they had already submitted the same for the digital life certificates (Jeevan Pramaan Patra).
“I had been receiving the pension regularly until April. When I enquired, they told me my claim has been rejected and asked me to bring the documents and register my fingerprint again,” said a resident of Villivakkam.
However, pensioners said they had been turned away without payment of last month’s pension despite producing the documents for the second time.
“They said that we would receive the arrears along with next month’s pension,” said Natesan. The retirement fund body had, in February, reportedly withdrawn its decision to make Aadhaar mandatory for withdrawal claims.
“Since we have already registered using the required documents and the amount had been credited to our accounts regularly until now, the authorities could have just given us a deadline for submission of the documents and continued to credit the pension amount,” said a pensioner.
According to a senior official in the pension scheme department at the sub-regional office, pensioners have been asked to produce the documents and register fingerprints again to rectify cases of mismatches in names in the pension payment order against the Aadhaar card. “Some of them have never turned up with the required documents,” he said.
On why the pension for May would not be credited in June itself after pensioners submit the documents again, the official said, “Ours is a centralised system. All the processes for disbursement would be completed by the last week of every month. Corrections can only be made in the next cycle, that is, the last week of the next month.”