On November 2, 2019 the Minister of State (MoS-independent charge) for Labour and Employment, Shri Santosh Kumar Gangwar launched 3 apps during the 67th foundation day of Employees’ Provident Fund Organization (EPFO) in New Delhi. The 3 apps are UAN Registration, E-Inspection and DIGI Locker. These apps were developed by EPFO for enhancing ease of doing business and also to promote transparency in EPFO. A booklet commemorating the journey of EPFO from 1952 to 2019 was also released.
The apps in detail:
i.UAN Registration: With the UAN (Universal Account Number) registration, a worker can immediately obtain Provident Fund(PF), life insurance and pension benefits without dependence on employer. Thus it leads to ease of living and also ensures for social security.
ii.DIGI locker: The Pension Payment Order(PPO) will be integrated with Digi Locker website/app in electronic form thus making easy access to individual pensioners. It is also part of the move towards paperless system.
iii.E-Inspection: E-inspection form by EPFO will help the employers who haven’t filed Electronic Challan cum Return(ECR) and provides information related to closure of business or unpaid dues for payment. The employers will be nudged based on compliant behaviour and prevent them from undue harassment of non-willful defaulter.
Award distributions:
Awards were distributed to various EPFO offices under several categories.apart from that, Two new categories on swachhta (Cleanliness) and punctuality were included in the award. They were as follows,
- Best performing EPFO offices: These include EPFO zonal offices of Haryana, Dehradun(Uttarakhand), Agra (Uttar Pradesh) and Thrissur(Kerala).
- Best Online Claims settlement performer: KrishnaRaja Puram (K R Puram) EPFO office in Karnataka.
- Best in KYC seeding in UAN: Regional Office(RO), Delhi was adjudged best in Know Your Customer (KYC) seeding in UAN.
- The best performing IT team award: EPFO Team that developed facility for UAN for workers.
- The best performing Exempted PF Trust award: BHEL (Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited) Hyderabad Provident Fund Trust.
- Swachhata: RO of Dehradun.
- Punctuality: RO of Kannur, Kerala.
Current EPFO statistics:
- EPFO is one of the biggest social security organisation that covers 6 crore active members and 65lakh pensioners. It maintains account of 22crore workers with fund worth 13 lakh crores. The interest rate of EPFO was recently increased upto 8.65%.
- EPFO is the largest user of UMANG (Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance) app i.e 87% of customers on the UMANG app are EPFO subscribers. 92% grievances get resolved in 20 days and 98% of the grievances on CPGRAM (Centralized Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System) related to EPFO are resolved in 9 days. Public outreach programme of EPFO “Nidhi Aapke Nikat” (fund near you) also eased the grievance redressal.
- Members present: Heeralal Samariya, Secretary of labour & employment, Sunil Barthwal, Central Provident Fund Commissioner and other officials were present during the event.
About EPFO:
- Founded- 4 March 1952.
- Headquarters- New Delhi.
- On 1 October 2014, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi launched UAN for employees covered by EPFO to enable PF number portability.