SPARSH or BEARHUG Chapter 1

 

SPARSH or BEARHUG Chapter 1

Much water has flown down the Draupadi Ghat of Prayagraj in the past four millennium. The Office of the Principal Controller of Defence Accounts (Pensions) ,PCDA(P) , is situated on the banks of this  sacred Ghat!  It controls the finalization of pension entitlement of veterans and family pensioners and its disbursement to their bank account. It is pertinent to note that the Armed forces were one of the very first organizations to be conferred with monetary benefit as pension after their term of service from the time they were recruited by the British East India Company.

  Pension Fund Regulatory & Development Authority (PFRDA) was managing the   Pension Funds under the NPS for Central Government and State Government employees till recently. After SPARSH took over, It handles Pension Fund Management across the spectrum viz. Corporate Pensions & Bank Pensions, Government Pension and Atal Pension Yojana except the migrated pensioners and family pensioners of Armed Forces.   

SBIPFPL has been appointed as the Pension Fund Manager (PFM) along with 9 (Nine) others to manage the pension corpus under National Pension System (NPS). SBIPFPL is one of the 3 (three) PFMs appointed by the Pension Fund Regulatory & Development Authority (PFRDA) for management of Pension Funds under the NPS for Central Government (except Armed Forces) and State Government employees and one of the 10 (Ten) PFMs appointed for management of Pension Funds under the Private Sector. SBIPFPL has been appointed as the Pension Fund Manager (PFM) along with 9 (Nine) others to manage the pension corpus under National Pension System (NPS).INR 3.76 Trillions is the Corpus they have in one of the nine.  One Trillion is One Lakh Crore Rupees. 100000 00000000  ( 10¹³) While this is the case in respect of every Government Department of India , there was no pressing need to take over this responsibility from a matured , widely dispersed and user friendly system and start a new system without detailed system analysis and Data flow analysis.  SPARSH has become the proverbial Albatross   

SPARSH has grand vision statements and these were evolved based on imaginary perceptions and pipe dreams. After almost three years of migration to SPARSH system, not one of the aims is either achieved or hope to be achieved.

Vision Statement as defined in the SPARSH official website : “Correct pension to pensioners at right time.”

It intends to provide the following benefits.

1.       Correct pension payment to pensioner.

2.        Individual information dissemination to pensioners on portal and mobile devices.

3.       Reduction in number of grievances

4.       Single source of truth

5.       Correct accounting etc.

6.       As a single platform connecting all stakeholders.

The vision statement has carefully avoided including cost savings though it was touted as the main reason to impress the CDS to agree to SPARSH and that the cost saved could be gainfully diverted for procurement of deficient warlike equipment! In practice more expenditure is incurred in development ,hosting and ma9intenance of thee system. This will be a recurring cost. it is also pertinent to note the saving of cost has not been specified in concrete terms to the Armed Forces Chiefs or the CDS. All other Government departments also incur expenditure for third party administration for disbursal. If it was a concern, it should have been the concern by the Finance Ministry. Even with in Ministry of Defence the SPARSH is not applicable to everyone. So it gives a unnerving feeling as to why a robust existing system already in place is replaced by SPARSH notwithstanding the benefits listed under its Vision Statement which are myths and pipedream! It is also pertinent to note that not even one out of the listed benefits has been achieved till date !

 At the end of the third chapter in this blog I will give my reasoning as why it has failed now and why it will never be a success.

 History of Defence Accounts:

The Defence Accounts Department (DAD) which has lived through more than two and half centuries is one of the oldest departments under the Government of India. Its origin can be traced to the Military Pay Masters under the East India Company. In January 1750, the First Pay Master was appointed for paying the Garrison at Fort Williams, Calcutta. Payments to the troops in the field were made by a Commissary. In 1776 a Commissary General was appointed for regulating the accounts.

In 1788, the designation of the Commissary General was changed to Military Auditor General who exercised his control over all Military Disbursements. When the British Crown started administering India in 1858, there were Military Accountants General in the Presidencies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay.

The office of the Accountant General, Military Department, was created in April 1864. In 1865, the Government recognized this position as the Head of the Military Accounts Department. In 1922, office of Military Accountant General was reorganized post-war and 1 MAG, 2 Dy.MAGs, 2 Asstt. MAGs and 100 Accountants and clerks were sanctioned. Office of MAG then comprised of 8 sections viz. Record, AN, Audit, Accounts, Estimate, Pay, Foreign Claims and Inspection.

The Department was re-named as Defence Accounts Department (DAD) on October 1st, 1951 and the Departmental Head designated as Controller General of Defence Accounts (CGDA). For more than three decades after independence, the DAD functioned under the administrative control of the Ministry of Finance. With the introduction of the Integrated Financial Advisor scheme in the Ministry of Defence from August 1983, the Department came under the administrative control of the Ministry of Defence.

1 Oct. 1951 Military Accounts Department re-designated as Defence Accounts Department. Controllers of Military Accounts re-designated as Controllers of Defence Accounts. Military Accountant General re-designated as Controller General of Defence Accounts (CGDA).

1983 Integrated Financial Scheme introduced in the Ministry of Defence- FA (DS) and DAD came under the administrative jurisdiction of MOD.

(The above information is culled from the Official Website of PCDA P.)

The reason for narrating its history is to apprise the reader as to how long this organization has been in dealing with veterans and family pensioners. In fact the Pensions were disbursed to First and Second World War veterans long before the advent of banking services, to the remotest part of this vast subcontinent of Colonial India. Having handled the Pension Services for the Armed Forces Personnel for the past more than six decades, PCDA P should have become the most robust and error free data holder and processor by now. Unfortunately it is not so. Every Regiment / Institution has to send a team of their own staff on temporary duty to PCDA to ameliorate the pension related grievances of their veterans and family pensioners. It is mainly due to tardy and lethargic clerical work in PCDA P. This will not change and will become worse when their staff will shift the blame to SPARSH and SPARSH will shift it back the aggrieved pensioner as it is happening now!

Even as recent as 1960s pensions were disbursed through Government treasuries without a glitch in the absence of modern day computer and communication facilities.  When I was commissioned in the late sixties on probation, my monthly pay slip used to be hand written and sent from CDA (O) Pune through post who maintained a hand written Individual Running Ledger Account (IRLA) of each Officer. Likewise the Pay and Accounts Office (PAO)  of each regiment would maintain the IRLA of personnel below the Officer rank (PBOR). These two are also under the Controller General of Defence Accounts under Ministry of Defence. The  authority  for arriving at the pay entitlements and deductions are based on the Personnel Occurrence Report  (POR) published  by the concerned unit of the individual soldier and vetted by the respective Record Office   ( AG’s Branch Org 9 (F) is now renamed as Record Office ( Officers)) sand sent to PAO or CDA (O) . Navy and IAF have their own Accounts officer in each Station /establishment to handle their pay and allowances.

 Prior to retirement thoroughly vetted docents of a retiree is forwarded by PAO and CDA (O) through Last Pay Certificate (LPC) cum Data Sheet to PCDA (P) . The personal data is scrutinized for correctness by the respective record offices based on the manually maintained Sheet Rolls of Individual PBOR and Service Record of Officers held by AG’s Branch. Based on the LPC cum data Sheet, the CDA (P) Allahabad would generate the Pension Document of each pensioner and allot a Pension Pay Order. This is a unique identity of a particular pensioner and not allotted to anyone else. If there are amendments, corrections, additions; they are published through Corrigendum PPO(s) to the main PPO.  For  example  revision of Year birth of Spouse complete Date Birth of Spouse (DD/MM/YYYY) as a corrigendum PPO , Revision of pay band as a consequence of Pay Commission Report etc.  

It is pertinent to mention that Army was one of the first organizations for automation of CDA (O) functions using a Wipro Mini Computer. The other two were Railways and then EME Record Office. Digital main Frame Computers were installed in DRDO at Metcalf house, Delhi, an IBM Main Frame at Signals enclave, Dhaulakuan, Delhi and a TATA Digital Computer at Military College of Telecommunication at Mhow. It is sad that in spite of such an early start, the powers that be in the Armed Forces Headquarters, especially those managing Systems have become silent spectators of the mess that is created by SPARSH which sees no light at the end of the tunnel.

My credentials to write this blog:

I was one of the first batches to undergo training in System analysis and programming in 1977 at MCTE  Mhow. While programming was taught in basic assembly language, COBOL and FORTRAN, a thorough grounding was given for analyzing any system to plan the conversion to manual to computer based system.

It was my good fortune that I was posted in HQ Technical Group EME to develop systems for the Corps of EME with access to the IBM main frame.  I was posted to No 1 EME Centre Secunderabad to develop a computerized information system for EME Records handling more than 100000 (one Lakh) records of Combatants and Civilians of the corps of EME. The most critical part of the project was to ensure that there were no transcription and transposition errors while keying data from Sheet Rolls of individual combatant. This was achieved by double keying of data for mismatch. The reason for emphasizing this point is to highlight that it does not follow the syndrome of “Garbage in Garbage OUT” which is one of the major reasons for the glitches in SPARSH.   It was completed in a record time of three years and we could give data to PAO Secunderabad in digital format so that they need not waste time in manual data capture, validation and conversion of EME personnel. .  This was in 1986. Again in 1996, when the problem of Y2K  ( Year 2000) was looming large all over the world threatening to disrupt the working of the legacy systems, I again ported  the system I developed in EME Records to the then popular RDBMS ( Relational database management system) using UNIX operating System and Unify Database. Client- Server technology was still in infancy.  This was successfully completed in 1998 two year ahead of the dawn of the next millennium.

After my retirement in 2000, I have worked as  Project Head and  Senior consultant of a Private Company engaged in software development for Clients in India and abroad. For twenty years I have planned, estimated, costed and lead a team of software professionals for clients in India and US.

I feel sad that in spite of the lead that Indian Army had in computerization field from seventies, almost all the systems developed for the Defence forces in General and Army in particular have been outsourced to IT Companies in Civil, because the powers that be felt that they would do a better job and deliver the goods in time and economically. The ground results are anything but any of the above.

SPARSH is a case study to prove that in spite of a global recognition as a lead developer, the firm entrusted with development of SPARSH has made a mess of it. It will not be able to entangle it anytime in future. SPARSH is the only system developed without going through document analysis, data flow, pilot project, parallel run; thorough testing by introducing deliberate errors to detect exceptions, development of user-friendly prompts to handle interrupts prior to implementation. I am amazed that they have not even catered for the peak traffic resulting in frequent ‘server down’ of its web site!  

Also this is the only system developed anywhere in the world where the people are asked to take corrective workaround action to rectify the mistakes made in data capture by PCDA P  and the third party developers’ unwanted checks of data captured by other  agencies like Aadhaar ,PAN or Bank accounts.   

CPPO is handling the pension of ten times the number of pensioners what PCDA P is handling.( It is still handling the un-migrated defence pensioners.)   If Pensioners of Paramilitary forces, Railways, PSUs, Cabinet Secretariat and other hundreds of organizations are put to such agony like what has SPARSH done to migrated pensioners, hell will break loose on the floor pf the Parliament and will cost pretty heavily to the party in power in the next elections. Unfortunately we veterans are mute and dumb spectators with our own serving senior officers burying their heads in sand like the proverbial ostrich!

 

 

It is not SPARSH, it is a bear- hug, that too, a rogue one.

To say India is not ready for digital revolution is wrong. CPPO is handling millions of pensioners of Atal Pension Yojana, farmers getting subsidy for fertilizer, housewives getting subsidy for gas, students getting scholarship amount from PM's various schemes apart from a number of freebie pensions getting announced day after day by various state governments. 90 percent of the beneficiaries don't know how to read or write in their mother tongue. Their only documents are their Aadhaar linked to their bank account. Month after month they get their pensions or subsidy without a glitch. It is the responsibility of the developers to ensure that the system is both foolproof and idiot proof.

The problem with SPARSH is poor data capture and validation by PCDA P. The basic document is LPC cum Data Sheet sent by PAO (OR) of respective Regiments and CDA(o) Pune in case of officers.

If these two entities have been crediting the salaries when the veterans were   in active service correctly month after month, how the data sent by them through LPC cum Datasheet to PCDA P gets corrupted in SPARSH database? Also the Aadhaar linked to his IRLA, POR, Bank Account Number are same in his PPO data captured from LPC cum Data Sheet. PAO (OR) and CDA (O) never denied the monthly salary saying that the name of the person is not not exactly matching with that in Aadhaar nor they threaten to stop the salary if they edit the PIN Code in Aadhaar. Why no one in the Armed Forces who have done lofty post graduation courses, got Doctorate in IT from some of the top IITs have not questioned this so far?

I will take on the Vision Statements of SPARSH and how every one of them have failed and will fail in future in the last chapter.

Also I I will highlight the great security threat that is likely from keeping biographic data like Fingerprints, Iris prints in the ECHS database in the last chapter to conclude that Aadhaar Card can replace all the Smart cards introduced by the Armed Forces for Canteen Services, ECHS and even for personal identity .