NEW DELHI, Dec 15: The System for Pension Administration-Raksha (SPARSH), the government’s flagship Digital India initiative for defence pensions, has onboarded 31.69 lakh defence pensioners across India and Nepal, emerging as the country’s largest end-to-end digital pension platform.
The introduction of SPARSH has also significantly improved transparency, grievance redressal and timely disbursement of pensions, a Defence Ministry statement said here on Monday.
The statement said the system replaces a fragmented system managed earlier by over 45,000 agencies with a unified, transparent and accountable digital framework.
The ministry said that out of 6.43 lakh discrepant cases migrated from previous systems, 6.07 lakh have been normalised without affecting pensioners’ entitlements.
Further, 284 SPARSH Outreach Programmes and 194 Raksha Pension Samadhan Ayojans have been held across the country. More than 8,000 grievances were resolved on the spot during these programmes conducted in the current Financial Year (FY).
The pensioners can now view complete pension details online and easily raise corrections. Average grievance redressal time has come down from 56 days in April 2025 to 17 days in November 2025 and as per the latest Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances report, the Defence Accounts Department (DAD) has achieved a 73 per cent satisfaction score, ranking 5th among Ministries/Departments.
Under the nationwide Digital Life Certificate (DLC) 4.0 campaign of the Department of Pension & Pensioners’ Welfare (DoP&PW), DAD has mobilised 202 offices, 4.63 lakh Common Service Centres, and 15 partner banks, supported by 27 Nodal Officers. As of November 30, 2025, 20.94 lakh DLCs have been generated for Defence Pensioners – the highest among all Departments.
The ministry also stated that in the financial year 2024-25, a Defence Pension Budget of Rs 1,57,681 crore was disbursed on a real-time basis through SPARSH. OROP-III, implemented in July 2024, enabled the quick disbursal of Rs 1,224.76 crore to 20.17 lakh beneficiaries in just 15 days. (UNI)
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