Military pensioners

The purpose of writing this letter is not to belittle the efforts of the Controller Military Accounts Officers’ Pension (CMA OP) but to highlight some problems faced by retiring officers or widows of deceased officers. The first is the ‘manual’ way of working till the case of an officer is processed and then ultimately gets uploaded on a computer in the ‘facilitation centre’. However, there are only two telephone numbers at the centre that remain busy with only one person to attend to calls. There is no UPS backup provided to the centre with the result that work remains suspended during loadshedding, and picks up steam after half an hour of the restoration of electricity. With government orders to all pensioners to change to DCS (direct credit system), a huge load of work has befallen on the CMA OP for which it appears to be ill-equipped. The basement that houses the pension record and clerical staff looks more like a dungeon with old rotten files bursting out of cupboards.

General Raheel Sharif is requested to order his staff officers to personally visit the offices of the CMA and the CMA OP to see for themselves the state in which these offices operate, and suggest and implement some modernisation plans that help mitigate the problems of military pensioners.

Major (r) Talaat Khurshid

Rawalpindi