The forgotten pensioners

Not a day passes when letters by pensioners of the Punjab government don’t appear in various newspapers. These pensioners have been protesting against the apathy of the Punjab government towards them – but to little avail.

While the federal government and three other provinces settled the pension dues of their pensioners including the grant of double pension where the rules permitted long ago, the Punjab government continues to drag its feet over the matter.

The pensioners are senior citizens and retired employees of the government who once had their heydays. After retirement, they are at a critical stage of their lives when they need money to run their households and pay for their medical treatment.

When old age comes, sickness is not far behind. Even though the children of the pensioners are usually settled in life and they happily offer to look after the needs of their retired parents, pensioners have an emotional attachment with their pensions. And rightly, when a pensioner doesn’t get his pension in time, he thinks he has been robbed by the government.

The earlier practice was that pensioners visited the nearest branches of the National Bank and received their pensions. The problem started when the government introduced a new system to remit the pension online to pensioners’ bank accounts. That created s host of problems for the pensioners as the new procedure involved the government treasury and the accountant general branch.

The staff at these two offices is known for operating at their own pace. The doddering pensioners had to climb stairs and run from pillar to post to streamline their pension procedure. As a result, many pensioners haven’t received their pensions for the last many months.

But why are pensioners in Punjab given a run for their pensions when pensioners in other provinces haven’t faced any problems in getting theirs? Rumour-mongers say that the pension funds have been exhausted already on other projects.

Seriously speaking, the Punjab government has taken too long to settle the pension issues of its pensioners. Maybe it thinks the old pensioners are of little use because, first, they are not keen to vote and, second, they are critical of governance issues and of promises not being delivered on. Ironically, some pensioners even think the government is waiting for them to report to their Maker to end the matter for good.

However, old people have their own idiosyncrasies. The grand old men who retire from senior positions, such as government secretaries and so on, are usually too garrulous to manage. On a given occasion, when a retired secretary or a general opens the conversation with “listen boys, how things were done in our days…” you had it. Of course, this category of society is privileged and it faces problems neither during service nor after retirement. Only the midlevel pensioners are given a runaround in pension matters.

In fact, any new procedure that the government adopts to facilitate the citizens turns into a nightmare for them. Take, for instance, the licensing procedure for weapons. Once all that a licence-holder had to do was to walk to the nearest post office and renew the licence of his weapon. Many renewed their licences for three years, as allowed by law, and lived in peace. Then Nadra stepped in and peace for the licence-holders stepped out.

This poor writer had to deposit his weapon licence in Dera Ghazi Khan where it was made years ago. After waiting for months, the message arrives that the new licence is ready for collection at a Nadra pigeonhole in DGK. How to travel 250 miles to collect it? One only imagines Nadra as a large dragnet and licence-holders as helpless pigeons.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Lahore. Email: pinecity@gmail.com