With the last date to submit the life certificate approaching, it’s time to panic for most pensioners who are away from the bank branch or the post office where their pensions get credited every month. As more than one crore families sustain their lives on government pensions, the issue of Life Certificate becomes a mammoth one in November each year.

Moreover, after retirement, many government employees choose to move to a different location either to be with their family or due to other reasons, causing a huge logistical issue for them to access the Life Certificate to get their rightful pension amount.

You may get your Life Certificate both offline and online through the following processes.

Conventional Life Certificate: As usual, you may visit your pension disbursing agency, that is the bank branch or the post office etc, in person within the cutoff date and submit the specified form to get the Life Certificate without any issue.

However, if you stay near the post office or bank branch, but not in position to visit the branch due to illness, an official of the pension disbursing agency may visit you at your home to complete the formalities of issuing the Life Certificate.

Digital Life Certificate: Major problem arises if a pensioner stays in some other city or state, away from the location of the pension disbursing agency. Traveling to reach the branch to get the Life Certificate every year causes a lot of hardship and unnecessary inconvenience particularly for the aged and infirm pensioners who cannot always be in a position to present themselves in front of the particular authority to secure their certificates.

To solve the problem, the government has launched a system of digital Life Certificate for pensioners named Jeevan Pramaan, which may be accessed without visiting the home branch and even online through biometric authentication using the Aadhaar platform. On successful authentication, a Digital Life Certificate is generated, which gets stored in the Life Certificate Repository that Pension Disbursing Agencies can access online.

To generate the Jeevan Pramaan online, you need to have either a personal computer (PC) with Windows 7 (or above) OS 32 & 64 bit, or an Android 4 and above mobile or tablet along with a biometric device like finger print scanner or iris scanner. First you have to download the PC/Mobile/Tablet application from jeevanpramaan.gov.in/app/download and then get yourself registered by providing information of your Aadhaar, Pension Pay Order (PPO), bank account, bank name and mobile number. To complete the registration process, you have to provide your biometric – either finger print or iris – using the scanner that you have to authenticate yourself.

If you don’t have any scanner or required PC/Mobile/Tablet, you may visit the nearest Jeevan Pramaan Centre like Citizen Service Centre (CSC) or Pension Disbursing Agencies (PDA) such as Post Office, Banks, Treasury etc and provide the required details like your Adhaar, PPO, bank account, mobile number to get the Digital Life Certificate. To get the details of nearest CSC, you have to send an SMS writing JPL to 7738299899.

On successful authentication, you will get an SMS acknowledgment containing your Jeevan Pramaan Certificate ID among other details. The certificate will be stored in the Life Certificate Repository, which may be accessed any time and any where by the pensioner and the Pension Disbursing Agency.

You may download a PDF copy of the certificate from the Jeevan Pramaan site by providing the Jeevan Pramaan ID or Aadhaar number. You may also share the details with your Pension Disbursing Agency.