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PF claim to be settled in 2-3 days: Jatiya

In a significant move to help a worker get Employees' Provident Fund claim settled within two to three days, the Centre on Thursday unveiled a comprehensive plan to strategically reposition the EPF as a customer-centric organisation.

"The objective of the plan is to enable a customer-centric geometric growth in the spread and reach of old age income security to the working class," Labour Minister, Satyanarayan Jatiya, said while unveiling the 'Re-inventing EPF-India' plan.

He said the plan sought to reposition the EPF as a frontline provider of provident fund, pension and other old age income security products.

"The immediate goal is to establish a system that will enable a worker to access his or her account current balance in any of the 267 EPF outlets across the country, submit a claim and get it settled within 2-3 days," he said.

While the short-term strategy aimed at bringing about a significant improvement in the quality of on-going programmes within the available systems and process, the long-term goal was to reposition EPF organisation as customer-centric capable of producing geometric growth of 20-30 per cent as against the current average incremental growth of 6.6 per cent.

Jatiya said old age income security protection was at present available to 26 million people which worked out at 10 per cent of the estimated working class population.

"The modernisation programme seeks to build up the capacity of EPF to enable it to significantly close the uncovered gap," he said, adding that this would specifically focus on the growing ranks of casual labour.

The minister said the project had passed the planning mode and was now in the implementation mode. It would be implemented in the first phase across six clusters at Indore, Kota, Gurgaon, Patna, Mangalore and Hyderabad by October 2001 and elsewhere by August 2004.

He said that in the next three months, the process of registration would start. This would involve issuance of a nationally unique identity number of each member of EPF along with a 'Smart Card' that will carry the employee's profile and employment details, the employee's identification details and passbook.

The unique number - SSN (Social Security Number) - would remain employee-specific regardless of the identity of the employer and regardless of any change in employment, he said and added that this would enable participation of even casual and migrant workers as they would be able to access their account from any location.

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