A Personal Odyssey — Getting my Life Certificate

Earlier, when India was in the Digital Dark Ages (DDA), getting my life certificate as a pensioner was a breeze.

I strolled to my bank, contacted the manager, filled up my life certificate application form, produced my Pension Pay Order copy and voila, obtained my Life Certificate. Done. I was good for another year.

Then came Aadhaar.

Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and a million Rohingya were finger-printed first, certified as bonafide citizens of India and eligible for government handouts. We Indians stood in line behind, as is only fitting. Why, you ask? According to the late great Manmohan Singh (great as only Congressmen can be) minorities have the first right on India’s resources. So since Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and the one million Rohingya (not to speak about our 250 million ‘Indian’ Muslims), would qualify as minorities when compared to the 900 million strong ostensibly ‘Hindu’ population in the subcontinent, they will be ahead of you in the queue. Simple, no? Not rocket science.

Once Aadhaar came, proving that I was still alive became a bit more difficult. Aadhaar required you to be finger printed. Now since I had hardly any finger prints left after the age of sixty, this became an yearly ordeal. Several attempts and an hour later after the machines had failed to successfully capture my fingers and toes multiple times, they would bring out the good old stamp pad and then take a thumb impression on the paper life certificate application. All this after I had provided several other proofs of my survival and identity.

The caution of the authorities is understandable. After all I am neither Rohingya nor Bangladeshi, merely an ex-Indian Air Force fighter pilot. As a responsible babu, you have to be cautious these days — cannot have freeloaders feasting on what is meant for the aforesaid poor minorities.

Then came SPARSH.

What’s Sparsh? It was a scheme dreamed up by the fertile minds of our babus in the Defence Accounts Service to ensure streamlined pension distribution for defence retirees. Wow! So nice of them. Why didn’t they do this favour to the civil service employees, who number about three times as many?

Actually it is another empire-building exercise at the expense of the faujis. You remember Agniveer, another brilliant scheme to save the govt the outlay on defence pensions by inducting youngsters otherwise qualified to be soldiers in temporary vacancies. Three-fourths of them will be boarded out with a gratuity after four years, one-fourth being enrolled as soldiers with a pension after they retire.

Like Agniveer, Sparsh is a hare brained scheme which was supposed to save money, but has utterly failed to do so. The earlier time tested system had the banks disbursing defence pensions. Our babus convinced someone in govt that crores of rupees could be saved if the banks were eliminated and the babus did the jobs themselves. Now anyone who has had anything to do with the Govt of India knows that what babus do does not save anyone any money. They just create a new fiefdom, expand their power and increase the paperwork. The supposed beneficiary just goes around in circles.

What did they do? They hired Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s biggest software company to create a software to do the job. TCS made the software, but then neglected to enter the correct data for all pensioners.

When a pensioner dies his spouse is supposed to get a family pension. So her details are entered as the Next of Kin (NoK). What they did was enter the date of death for most spouses as 01 Jan 1970. So when they were onboarded, most pensioners found that their spouses had pre-deceased them before they were enrolled or commissioned or even married. There were other errors too like dates of birth, pension pay order number etc.

You must remember that names and dates have to be exactly correct, as entered in the record book and pension pay order. Otherwise you might as well be dead, because that is what the system considers you to be.

If you are computer savvy, correction is no big deal. However many family pensioners are not and so they had huge problems. Those located in inaccessible places had to trek many miles in order to find a suitable centre to explain to them what they were required to do. Now you also have to have people to man the data centres Sparsh requires. They have to be paid. So you end up spending much more than the money the babus claim to have saved. But that’s how govt works.

A real botch-up of the kind our babus love. Why? Because it gives them great scope for corruption. After all the Govt of India was created basically to ensure that our babus live in the style they have grown accustomed to, at the public expense and with the donations they obtain for doing the work they are paid to do.

I was not surprised when I was not onboarded. I expect the worst and my hopes are usually fulfilled. So I remained with my bank and continued to get the pension therefrom.

When you are onboarded you are supposed to get a message on your registered mobile and an email from someone with a code number. This email will usually land up in your spam folder. And who reads mobile messages, when you have Whatsapp? So this brings me to the conclusion that you are meant to miss this message. Then they will tell you — We sent you a message and you did not respond.

Anyway once you get that code, you are supposed to enter it on the Sparsh website. You now receive your Sparsh details, which are usually incorrect. But you can then at least begin the process of correcting the entered data.

I attempted many times to find out whether I had been onboarded, but failed. Finally after four years I contacted a coursemate who had retired as an Air Mshl. His intervention got me a call from the Directorate of Air Veterans (DAV) which acts as the intermediary with the Principal Controller of Defence Accounts in Allahabad. I asked him why I had not been Sparshed and he said that this could take some more time. There were still several thousands who had been left out. I was in good company and should not get worried.

When you get marooned on a desert island, it’s nice to know that you are not alone. So that was that.

But then along came the Jeevan Pramaan app — the BJP’s great contribution to the Digital India initative. The app was engineered by the NIC I referred to earlier. It was supposed to recognise your face, as filmed on your registered mobile, and confirm that you were still alive. I tried many times on my humble Samsung mobile.

This is a very tricky process. You have to download the Jeevan Pramaan app on your phone. Thereafter you enter your Aadhaar card number and then get an OTP. After entering this, the app after some declarations of faith (Allah hu Akbar and all that), allows you to scan your face into the app. This you have to do in a well-lit area.

When I first tried it, the app told me that I would have to download another app — the Aadhaar Face Recognition app — which would together with the Jeevan Pramaan app identify me. I did so. You have to blink at the app to get identified. So I tried again. And failed.

What was the problem? The face ID app could not access the Aadhaar database because I had locked it to prevent cyber theft. So I now had to access the Aadhaar app and temporarily allow the Aadhaar Face Recognition app to access the database to corroborate the identification. That should have been it. But was it? No! I failed again. Timed out. Tried again. Failed again.

If you were around Bangalore’s Jal Vayu Towers about two weeks ago, you would have seen a white haired old man skulking suspiciously around the stilt garages on the ground floor and then furtively looking into his camera, while blinking furiously all the while. Well, the blinking is when the camera is supposed to trigger a photograph of the culprit, I mean the pensioner.

I still failed.

You could have been forgiven for thinking that the old man was a voyeur or paedophile of some sort, but there were no young girls around. That should have been even more suspicious. A pervert who loves photographing drainpipes? There are plenty in the stilt garages.

I usually set myself a maximum limit of Rs 25000/- for any mobile phone I purchase. So perhaps the camera is not good enough. I got error messages saying the app had timed me out every time.

So I hied myself to my bank and told an unconvinced lady officer that my mobile really did not like my face. No surprise there. Several of my Commanding Officers (COs) too hadn’t. Anyway she used the app on her own phone. After several attempts over twenty minutes, with me blinking furiously at her phone, she finally told me my identification had been done successfully. I would shortly receive a message giving me my Jeevan Pramaan ID. Using this I could, if I wished, download my Life Certificate.

I am still waiting for the said life certificate.

While waiting, my wife and I and some friends decided to proceed on holiday. A short five day cruise to Goa and Lakshadweep. It was a great trip and we came back noticeably thicker around the waistline, what with all the eating and drinking onboard and on dry land.

On return I scanned my emails and messages for the life certificate. Not a whiff of it.

I decided that my cheap phone didn’t cut it. So I used my wife’s iPhone and downloaded all the necessary apps. Thereafter I started the process. To my surprise, the app worked perfectly. It caught the very first blink and gave me a ‘Successfully identified’ message. So I did it again. Two successful messages. Surely that should have been enough.

No, it wasn’t. The Jeevan Pramaan organisation or perhaps the app, was not convinced that I was who I said I was. I needed to ask someone why.

You perhaps think that pronouns mean I, me, they, you, she and so on. But there is a new one. This is called AI, pronounced Ai, not Aai. Like Aai but without the second ‘a’. Who is Ai? Well its Artificial Intelligence (AI). Now that evolution has proceeded apace and humans are all now obese, cannot count to five or add three and five without a calculator and cannot remember a four digit number, we need Ai.

So I asked Ai why I (not Ai) had not got my Jeevan Pramaan certificate. Simple it said. Here’s the answer -

If you successfully completed the Aadhaar face authentication but haven’t received your Jeevan Pramaan ID, the certificate might still be processing, or it might have been rejected due to incorrect details. You should receive an SMS notification and can check the status online.

Potential Reasons and Solutions

• Processing Time: While the authentication is real-time, there might be a slight delay (sometimes a few days, especially during high-traffic periods) for the system to generate the ID and for the SMS alert to arrive.
• Incorrect Details: The most common reason for rejection is a mismatch between the details you entered during the process (e.g., PPO number, bank account, name, date of birth) and those recorded with your Pension Disbursing Agency (PDA) or in the Aadhaar database.
• Technical/Server Issues: Occasionally, server-side issues can cause delays or errors in generating the ID.

Now I guess I’ll wait for a couple of days since Nov 30 is almost upon us.

So day after, to the bank to try again. If all else fails, fill up the simple paper Life Certificate application, get it signed and posted.

That reminds me of something.

I suppose you all know that there’s a city called Wuhan in China. I heard of it in 2019, when the world got COVID or thought it had.

Wuhan is one of the main technological centres in China. They had 5G back then and operational. So there were cameras every few yards because Uncle Xi Jin Ping loves his people and wants to know what they are upto. And the people love it because you have a social behaviour index. Good civic behaviour gets you points allowing you a promotion, better job prospects, better schools and holidays for your children and so on.

China is the most surveilled nation on the planet. They have cameras everywhere, possibly several per Chinese person. The govt knows what you are upto every second of every day. Crime is low and the police can usually apprehend a perpetrator within minutes of the crime.

Now if their data processing times are anything like the Jeevan Pramaan apps’s, the perpetrator would be on the slow boat to Hawaai, London or the Bahamas before the Party and the police knew that a crime had been committed. Remember Lalit Modi, Nirav Modi, Vijay Mallya, Mehul Choksi and many other entrepreneurs who live life in great style on borrowed money?

Oh, you tell me — India is a democracy. China is an authoritarian state. And now we have more people than China.

If we are such f…g idiots is that China’s fault?

And why do we have garbage on the streets? Why are our roads so bad? Why do we piss and spit in public?

Perhaps I’ll vote for Xi, if he’s a candidate in the next general election.

Perhaps then the Jeevan Pramaan app will work.