Kozhikode: Two years after the Supreme Court ordered higher EPF pensions to be allocated in proportion to salary, less than 1 per cent of applicants in Kerala have received their revised pensions.
An RTI response from the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) reveals that only about 2 per cent of applicants from Kerala have been granted a higher pension. Nationwide, Pension Payment Orders (PPO) have been issued to 8,401 out of the 17,48,775 people who opted for the higher pension. Employers are yet to approve 3,14,147 options submitted to the EPFO. Of the remaining 14,34,628 applications, the EPFO has rejected 1,48,434, while demand notices have been sent to only 89,235 people.
In Kerala, 90,919 people opted for the higher pension. However, employers did not approve 15,596 of these applications. As the submission deadline has passed, these are now ineligible for consideration. Among the remaining 75,323 applications, 4,648 were rejected by the EPFO.
Demand notices for additional contributions to the pension scheme have been issued to 10,151 applicants in Kerala, yet only 1,910 have received the revised pension as of October 4.
The key reasons for these procedural delays include staff shortages in PF offices and a lack of efficient software for pension calculation. For example, the Kochi Regional Office, which has to handle over 32,000 joint options, has only two officers available to handle the workload. These officials are required to manually enter data into the system. At this rate, pension applications will likely remain incomplete for several months.
Extended delays for pre-2014 retirees
The delay is even more severe for those who retired on or before August 31, 2014. Instead of receiving new options, the EPFO directed this group to submit applications to confirm the original pension options they submitted. While 4,10,043 individuals across India complied, employers approved only 2,70,346 applications. The EPFO then rejected 1,12,770 of these, and of the remaining 1.5 lakh applications, demand notices were sent to only 16 individuals. Worse still, just two individuals have received their PPO.
In Kerala, 11,084 retirees belong to the pre-2014 group. Out of these, employers approved the options of 8,127, but the EPFO subsequently rejected the options of 3,739 individuals. As of October 4, none of these retirees have received a demand notice.