This is the story of freedom. The freedom to explore the world. The freedom to shine bright. The freedom to grow. The freedom to fly. The freedom to learn. The freedom to try. The freedom to dream. The freedom to create a better future. The story of progress of India is the story of TCS. Hello and a very warm welcome to this special series. TCS Studios presents Transforming India. The story of progress of India is the story of the TCS. Now the story of India's independence is incomplete without. Mention to the countries armed forces. They have protected our sovereignty and have been the reason why all of us are safer and wake up to a better tomorrow every single day we are. TCS are very proud to be a part of that journey. But to make the lives of defense personnel that protect the armed forces simpler, CGDA has introduced A pension process that is game changing. Earlier defense personnel had to queue up to wait for their pensions of the sanctioned time would be. Almost 18 months or more today, they can get a text information and have their pensions in their bank accounts within a matter of seconds. The cycle time that is for the sanction has come down to less than a month, significantly less than a month. What is the reason behind this? What is the story behind why something of this sort has been undergone and how large of a transformation was this to make the lives of defense personnel better? Joining us today is a very, very special. Channel, I want to start by introducing Mr. Praveen Kumar, the Additional Controller General of Defence Accounts. Joining us are our very own TCSS, Anshu Tandon, the Program Manager at Sparse at TCS and Rakesh Luna, the Head of Gigov at TCS. Thank you so much to the entire panel for joining in. Mr. Kumar, I want to start by asking you about the journey that has been undergone for the entire process. Take out a little bit about why CGDA has introduced a project. With the scale and the kind of transformation that you had to adopt from ground up, let me introduce the subject that defense pension per se is a highly complex area. The difference there are more than 100 types of pensions, defense and defense pension. Pension itself is a complex area, but defense pension is almost a many times complex than normal civil pension. And you can very well visualize that our armed forces are deployed in the border far-flung areas. They are working in a very hospitable, inhospitable terrains, lot of casualties do happen. So the government and a lot of disabilities do take place like different, different that prolonged exposure to hostile environment make them disabled in many walk of life and which they come up. So they are entitled for several types of pension. Which is generally not applicable in a civilian, civilian pensioners. So the defense pension and the CR number, I can tell you that more than 30 lakh, 32,00,000 to be precise. Defense pensioners are there. Every year 80 to 90,000 new pensioners get added. So as a result of this. We used to have till 17 to 2016. Seventeen We used to have manual process where the manual PPO pension payment order which is called used to be issued now. Government thought that why not we digitize the whole process with the sole motive that right pension. At the right time. So the objective was there that the armed forces should be given better facility and to ensure that they are able to get the pension on time and correctly disbursement takes place. Correctly this pension used to be dispersed through our banks mainly public sector bank and there were a couple of private sector banks also. So what used to happen that the. Premium pension payment order used to be issued to the banks and the banks used to disperse but several times due to Pay Commission. That used to come like 4th Pay Commission, 5th Pay Commission, 6th Pay Commission. They used to bring their own complexity. So pension used to be revised every time and the revised pension used to be dispersed. So there were a lot of grievances coming from the pensioner fraternity. You see The thing is there that. The revision of pension is not automatic. It used to be done. And a pensioner, the defense pensioner, I can tell you unlike civil pensioner, they join at a very young age the armed forces to keep it young. They induct at 15 to 17 years of age. The people get inducted, they serve for 20 to 25 years, then they are out. But the pension is continued for 60 to 70 years post retirement and the within that period. The family pensioner also comes into the play and then the dependent person of that pensioner also is to be given pension. So normally a person will serve for 20 years, but the pension is to be given for 70 to 75 years. That is our assessment. So due to so many changes that will happen in 70 to 75 years journey, it was thought that why not be digitized the whole process so that at any point of time if we have to make any amendment. Changes, we can do it through digital mode so the technology can be used and the Government of India. Issued the order for Digital India initiative, the government decided that why not be the common citizen should be given this digital advantage and that is how the Spurs was conceived and Honorable Finance Minister in his budget speech in 2017. I remember that 2017 or 18 he gave the speech that we will create a web portal to handle the defence pension. So that is how the project was conceived and now TCS joined the. Partnership and we have reached this stage. I think the my other colleagues can explain in detail. This is why that's a perfect throwback into the entire journey and the process. Because, you know, sometimes when we make massive change, it's important to look back and see where we started from. So speaking about change, Rakesh, tell me a little bit about the kind of digital transformation that it took. Because Mr. Kumar said it perfectly. It's not a very easy feat to achieve. Tell us about the beginning of the journey and, you know, the kind of transformation that was embedded into the very portal and the very. Intricacies of the work that was done. sure kritika  so the actually has a sir mentioned the journey started some in 2017 when the tender was out opened tender and TCS participated in the standard by positioning over TCS IP digigo and we won this account. Leveraging our rich contextual knowledge and the excellent track record of implementing the projects of similar nature we reimagine a lot of processes. By taking them into confidence, like we introduced the concept of straight through processing wherever possible we introduce the pension data validation. It's also earlier the pensions which were the pension order which was generated for the pensioner. He was not aware actually what data has been considered by the department. So if I summarize in terms of transformation as in the, we have as of now on board. 20,000 fresh punchers have been directly onboarded into us Push OK, we have migrated Azure. Azure also mentioned that 4.6 like pensioners have already been legacy. Pensioner has been moved on to our platform and by this monthly run we will be adding five like 5 1/2 like more pensioners. Onto the system. So the transformation as mentioned earlier, it was 12 to 18 months for processing. The cycle has been reduced to less than 25 days, OK. The first payment which is a sort of a lump sum payment to the pensioner used to take a month almost. We have reduced it to what in a couple of days. The once they pay, the pension order was issued the disbursement agencies. There is a 1500 plus dispersement agencies with 45,000 odd branches across the nation. They were actually disbursed interpreting the order and dispersing, dispersing the money into their respective accounts, which is done now done away with it is centrally. It can be done through our RBI YouTube. Also since with all these 1500 odd agencies, reconciliation was a. So it was an activity in itself, OK, but this is done real time as a byproduct of how we the business is being conducted through our platform. So yeah, it is, it has been a great journey in terms of we are really geared up to onboard the remaining pensioners onto the platform and we actively. So we look forward to leverage our experience by replicating the same success story in some other areas. As a. Sure. You know, what's very important is the kind of transformation that was done, the vision of Digital India that was carried forward in this. And so coming over here, you've been closely embedded in the project. CGDA vision has been carried out and it still continues on a daily basis. Tell us how you saw lives transform. Any anecdotes that you can share about your experience as you saw this massive project actually become, you know, come to life in front of you? I would like to share one instance. While onboarding the first batch of 4.6 lakh legacy pensioners. So around 20 to 25,000 pensioners were underpaid by legacy systems or they were not given the pay as per the latest sanction order. So when this came to the notice of department, the pensions were revised, the dues were cleared and which must have brought some cheers to those pensioners. So in summary, I would say that spurge has made single. View of pensioner available which was earlier distributed across the systems. It has made accessibility of services to Pensioner at his fingertips with Pensioner portal and soon we are going to launch our mobile app. Pensioners now have increased transparency with real time tracking of their claims request and they have centralized repository of their documents like Form 16, pension slips, payment orders. So how many people are getting impacted affected by this transformation? So as mentioned, we have 4.6 lakh pensioners onboarded 90,000 fresh cases and 5.5 lakh LEGACY Pensioners are in process of onboarding. So Sparsh will be carrying out payments and pension processing for around 11,00,000 pensioners this August. To your mind, what are the lessons that other teams can take? From the sparse transformation program that you have undergone, what do your mind are the kind of you know transformation changes that can be adapted across digital India. From your perspective considering you've been a pioneer in this field, now this technology will help us. We can immediately switch over as I stated that any future order if at all government issues and they ask us to implement the impact, we can immediately implement it #1 #2 that many times the government. Policy is dependent on the experience of the system. In the legacy system we were unable to give the correct input to the government for taking any policy measure. Suppose certain policies to be implemented and government asked the data what will be the impact of this decision. We were unable to work out because we were manual system. The disbursement is to be done by the banks. Now everything on the single source of platform. Now it is much easier if government asks impact of any decision we can. Simply calculate this from the portal and we can give it to the government. So it will help the government immensely in future policy making. Rakesh tell us very quickly about the technology that was adapted. Because you know, here we are talking about how this can be used across the board and the lessons that can be used across projects. So take us through the technology and how this can be. How can this technology basically be adapted for the future? What's next for this platform? We were dealing with 3 million pensioners. We know that every month we have to run the cycle for 3 million pensioners we have to do. The eligibility tech, we have to run the compute their pensions. We have to send this disbursement instruction to the other system which would reconcile the disperse payment done. We have to print the page like we have to generate the pay slip, sorry pension slips and then it has to be published in your respective accounts and that all have to be done in a span of five to six days. OK, so at the core of the design, we ensured a lot of parallel processing threading. We also introduce the job scheduling wherever possible. OK, so that was also taken care and this system has been integrated with 15 odd agencies for a seamless transfer of data in synchronous asynchronous mode. So what I would like to say is we have designed this first using the best in class technologies and capabilities and with the capability to continuously evolve and contribute towards the ease of living index of the pensioners and this platform as you rightly mentioned once done is tested and proven for such complex. Business case as or the scenario as mentioned by Sir that this is much more complex than the civilian pensions. So this can be easily replicated for the other scenarios, other use cases and also we are actively looking to how can we leverage this learning globally for other nations as well. And you tell me what else can be used? What are the other capabilities that can thereafter be unlocked. Because you know one interesting point that Mister. Are made of and all of you have touched upon is that this system is also evolving. It's continuously agile. It is changing with the time, changing with the requirement and that fits the whole growth and transformation agenda beautifully. Tell us a little bit about what other capabilities can be unlocked before I take closing comments from Mr. Kumar. Sparsh can be the platform with one common smart card for pensioners which can connect with all these agencies giving the pensionary benefits and this card can be issued as part of the retirement welcome kit with the pension payment order at the time of retirement to the pensioner. And one more scenario which wears parse platform can be leveraged and so there are pensioners who have who might have to take early retirements as early as 30 35 years maybe due to some injuries or for some for some accidents which as its as I already mentioned they have to endure a lot of challenges. So sparse can be the bridge to connect pensioners to the job opportunities. It's a job. Opportunities with required skills can be pushed to sparsh and with all the pensioner data available on sparse. Sparse can do carry out profiling, do skill gap analysis, identify pensioners for training and skill development and once the skills are updated in Sparsh, the pensions can be mapped to these opportunities. So these are the few scenarios which can contribute to the enhanced ease of living of pensioners of defense and likewise. This can very well work with the pensioners for, you know, railways post retirees at state or central level. So yeah, so this is what I could we could think of with this platform. Wow that that's a lot. That's CGDA and TCS are trying to achieve together. Closing comments then starting with Mr. Kumar. Mr. Kumar, in a nutshell, how do you think CGDA and TCS have together contributed to the vision of Digital India? And what does you know 75 years of independence mean to you personally? I have been seeing the result that 99% of the new pensioners are able to get the sanction, the pension payment order are issued to them before retirement and similarly on the disbursement front also we are able to make the disbursement to most of the people within 7 to 10 days time. It's a huge change and this change has happened because of the partnership and because of the directive given by the Government of India that let us digitize the whole process from end to end. Initiation to sanction to disbursement, all three stages must be combined through digital technology so that our pensioners are given due benefit. So it is impact is tremendous. In my opinion that this first project which is called the System for Pension Administration in Raksha Mantralaya, the acronym acronym was SPARSH is a game changer in all respect In all facets of life, I can only say and answer has. Already explained the benefit the offshoot that will accrue subsequently Once the fully implementation will take place, it will have the complete data bank available and whatever manner the data can be utilized for the benefit of our people. I have goosebumps just thinking about, you know, the kind of feat that it has achieved. And there's actually much more left to be unlocked. Alright. Mr. Kumar Anshu and Rakesh, thank you so much for joining in. The three people on this panel have been a part of the digital India journey in a very, very important way. And these are the stories that we are going to try to tell with this special series, our transforming India. The story of progress of India is the story of TCS. Thank you so much for watching. We'll be back at the same time. On this very platform, so stay tuned and hope to see you again next week.