Two years after the Supreme Court order, only 1 percent will receive increased pension from the PF

Kozhikode: Two years after the Supreme Court ordered higher EPF pensions to be provided in proportion to salary, less than 1 per cent of the claimants in Kerala have received the revised pensions.

The RTI response from the Employees’ Provident Fund (EPFO) shows that only about 2 per cent of Kerala claimants have received the higher pension. Across the country, pension payment orders (PPOs) have been issued to 8,401 of the 17,48,775 people who have opted for higher pension. Employers are yet to approve 3,14,147 options submitted to the EPFO. Of the remaining 14,34,628 applications, the EPFO rejected 1,48,434 while demand notices were issued to only 89,235.

In Kerala, 90,919 people opted for the higher pension. However, employers did not approve 15,596 of these applications. Since the application deadline has passed, they will not be considered. Of the remaining 75,323 applications, 4,648 were rejected by the EPFO.

Notices to demand additional contributions to the pension scheme have been issued to 10,151 claimants in Kerala, but as of October 4, only 1,910 have received the revised pension.

The main reasons for these procedural delays are the lack of staff in the PF offices and the lack of effective pension calculation software. For example, the Kochi regional office, which has to process over 32,000 joint cases, has only two staff members capable of handling the workload. These officials are required to manually enter data into the system. At this rate, pension applications are likely to remain pending for several months.

Expanded deferments for pensioners until 2014
The delay is even more severe for those who retired on or before August 31, 2014. Instead of receiving new options, the EPFO has directed this group to submit applications to validate the original pension options they had submitted. While 4,10,043 people across India fulfilled the requirements, employers approved only 2,70,346 applications. The EPFO then rejected 1,12,770 of them and of the remaining 1.5 lakh applications, demand notices were issued to only 16 persons. To make matters worse, only two people received PPO.

In Kerala, 11,084 pensioners belong to the pre-2014 pensioner group. Of these, employers approved options for 8,127 people, but EPFO subsequently rejected options for 3,739 people. As of October 4, none of these retirees have received a claim.