The Centre is set to make the retirement process easier for its employees with the launch of a new simplified pension application form. According to an official statement, the Department of Pension & Pensioners’ Welfare (DoPPW) will unveil the updated “Form 6-A” on Friday. Announced via a notification dated July 16, 2024, this new form aims to streamline the pension application process.

“This form will be available in Bhavishya/e-HRMS (online modules) to all the central government employees who are going to retire in December 2024 and onwards. The retiring officials, who are on e-HRMS, will fill Form 6-A through e-HRMS (only superannuation cases) and the retiring officials, who are not on e-HRMS, will fill Form 6-A in Bhavishya,” according to a statement released by the Personnel Ministry on Thursday.

The statement announced that Union Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances, and Pensions, Jitendra Singh, will launch the new form along with its integration with Bhavishya/e-HRMS on August 30, 2024.

Form simplification has been an important initiative of the Centre’s “maximum governance-minimum government” policy, it said. In this new form, a total of 9 forms/formats have been merged, the statement said.

This new form and related changes in the business process of Bhavishya will be a game changer as on the one hand it simplifies the pension form submission for the employee through “a single sign only” and on the other hand achieves the end-to-end digitisation of the entire process of pension processing till the start of pension payment after retirement, it added.

“This paves the path towards paperless working in the whole process of pension,” the statement said. It added that with a pensioner-friendly user interface, pensioners no longer need to worry about the forms they have filled out or might have missed. (With PTI Inputs)