Coal mine workers, pensioners to get PF alerts on mobiles

Come December 25 this year and a pool of over five lakh coal mine workers across the country will get access to their provident fund  (PF) balance on their mobile  handsets.

The Coal Mines Provident Fund Organisation (CMPFO) with a mandate to handle around Rs 75,000 crore of assets aims to submit status of claim, PF balance and pension payment through SMS service by December 25 coinciding with the day of good governance.

To set the ball rolling, CMPFO would go for Aadhar number seeding of coal employees and their pensioners. In the future, the coal employee’s Aaadhar number would be treated as the PF number and he can log in to the CMPFO website through this number and can get details of PF, pension and status of application. All queries of employees and pensioners would be addressed through interactive voice response system (IVRS).

A meeting of directors (personnel) of Coal India Ltd (CIL), its eight subsidiaries, CMPFO commissioner and heads of regional offices of CMPFO was held recently to chalk out the roadmap for Aadhar linkage.

“Such coordination will definitely remove the bottlenecks between coal companies and CMPFO and help the coal employees receive best services”, said L N Mishra, director (personnel), Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd (MCL), a CIL subsidiary.

The Aadhar number seeding is also expected to help the remotely located ailing pensioner to submit bio-metric life certificate on a hand-held device to be carried by the post man. This will be done in collaboration with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).

The thrust is on completing seeding of Aadhar number for increasing coverage of contractual workers and implementation of Form Sahaj for PF, pension and advance in the interest of employees and superannuated persons drawing pension.