Pensioners to be part of pro-people government programmes

The experience and skills of retired central government pensioners would be channelised by the Centre in execution of various pro-people programmes under an initiative launched for this purpose.
"With increasing life expectancy, government servants when they retire have a number of years of active service left and therefore, the government has launched a programme called 'Sankalp' to channelize skill and experience of pensioners into socially useful and constructive work," Union Minister V Narayanasamy has said.
The 'Sankalp' initiative would be taken up on a pilot basis initially for 500 pensioners, he said.
Addressing the 24th meeting of Standing Committee of Voluntary Agencies (SCOVA) here on Wednesday, Narayanasamy said that an online pension sanction and payment tracking system called 'Bhavishya' has been launched to track the progress of sanction of pension and other retirement benefits.

"This would benefit individual pensioners as well as administrative authorities," the Minister was quoted as saying in a press release issued today.
Due to rigorous monitoring, the government has been able to dispose off 22,498 pension-related grievances last year which resulted in bringing down the pendency to 6,882 and bringing relief to a large number of pensioners, said Narayanasamy, Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions.