Digital Life Certificate: Every year, lakhs of elderly pensioners have to submit their life certificates to their former working institutions by the end of November. Now, to do this digitally, the government is providing facilities to the elderly and has started making them through Digital Life Certificate (DLC). Under the biggest campaign of the government till date, more than 1.8 lakh pensioners have got their Digital Life Certificate (DLC) made on the very first day. This information has been received as per the information given by the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions.

 National Digital Life Certificate Campaign will run from 1 to 30 November

The Department of Pension and Pensioners Welfare Department launched the third and largest National Digital Life Certificate Campaign in 800 cities and districts across India from 1 to 30 November. Under this, the Personnel Ministry said in a statement, this is the largest DLC campaign till date and a total of 1.81 lakh DLCs have been generated till Friday evening.

This campaign is being run in collaboration with CGDA, Department of Telecommunications, Railways, UIDAI and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to reach out to all pensioners living in remote areas of the country. Apart from this, 19 banks, 785 district post offices and 57 welfare centres will also cooperate in the month-long campaign.

Life certificates of the elderly are being made using face recognition application

This technology enables identification of the pensioner by face scan using smartphone camera at home, thereby completing the process of DLC submission without the need to visit the bank or post office. The aim is to digitally empower pensioners using UIDAI's face recognition application.

Can be used on Android as well as iOS

EPFO said that 6.6 lakh facial scan-based DLCs in 2023-24 are about 10 per cent of the total DLCs received during the year. In total, about 60 lakh DLCs were received from pensioners during the last financial year. The Personnel Ministry said that the campaign aims to promote digital empowerment of pensioners by using facial recognition technology. Facial recognition has been made more easy and convenient for elderly pensioners and can be used on Android as well as iOS.

In June, the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) witnessed a more than three-fold increase in the number of EPS pensioners submitting facial authentication technology-based digital life certificates, from 2.1 lakh in 2022-23 to 6.6 lakh in 2023-24.