Telangana govt introduces app for pensioners to generate life certificate

Until earlier this year, N Papi Reddy used to have to visit Mahabubnagar, some 100 km from Hyderabad, where he has settled post retirement, to get his annual pensioner life certificate. Today, Reddy, who retired as a superintendent at the Mandal Parishad Development Office (MPDO) of Midjil Mandal in Mahabubnagar district, uses an app on his smartphone that can generate a life certificate without him having to step outside his house.

“What used to take couple of days for my father to travel all the way to Mahabubnagar to get his life certificate every year, now happens in a split second,” says Reddy’s daughter, N Swetha, who installed the app in her father’s phone. “The application saves a lot of time and energy of senior citizens, and has ensured dignity and sense of empowerment to my father,” says Swetha, an IPS officer who is currently posted as the Superintendent of Police in Kamareddy district of Telangana.

In an initiative which can revolutionise the pension disbursal system, the government of Telangana has rolled out an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning-based project wherein a pensioner needs to take a selfie using a dedicated micro-app on his/her smartphone, provide his/her name and the pension ID, and be issued a life certificate almost in real time. This is the first time in India that a government set-up is using AI, ML and other advanced tech for the convenience of pensioners.

The project, Pensioner Life Certificate through Selfie, which was launched in March this year, has already given results of 90 per cent accuracy. So far, 3,000 pensioners have verified their “liveness” through this app, but Telangana wants to cover a large portion of the 270,000 pensioners on its rolls before November this year.

The need for real-time verification of identity for different applications has always been profoundly felt. The life certificate is one such verification process, in which the treasury and accounts department of the government verify once a year if a pensioner is alive and if their pension should continue to be released to their drawing banks. 

To get certified, a pensioner needs to personally visit the government treasury office at the place from where he/she retired or the bank where the pension account is maintained and submit a filled-in form to the officials. This is often a challenging task for senior citizens who may not be staying anywhere near these places. 

The Telangana government also provides its pensioners the option of visiting one of the MeeSeva centres for finger print verification. However, not all such centres are equipped with finger print scanners, and there is always a high chance of mismatch of finger prints among older people whose prints wear off with age. 

“We looked at doing this differently by using demographic plus photo, which is also a two-factor authentication, to enable the real-time verification of pensioners,” says GT Venkateshwar Rao, Special Commissioner (e-governance) and Managing Director of Telangana State Technology Services, and Commissioner, MeeSeva. “China uses photo and video-based verification quite extensively. The technology has also matured quite a lot in recent years and is highly scalable and cost effective, as all you need is a smartphone.”

Part of the Telangana government’s mobile governance app, T App Folio, the pension life certificate app has a simple interface. A new user has to enter his/her pension payment order (PPO) ID, followed by the name as per the Department of Treasury and Accounts (DTA) records as well as the voter ID details. Next, the app asks the user to enter the photograph of the live person by using the phone’s camera. If you try to upload an older photograph, an error message pops up, saying the liveness of the picture couldn’t be verified. 

For this, the app uses an AI-based liveness detection and anti-spoofing technology. The AI algorithm checks the depth, glare and texture of the photograph to confirm whether or not the image uploaded is that of a live person. The anti-spoofing technology, provided by a Bengaluru based startup, is also being used in Vietnam for the opening of digital bank accounts.

The app also verifies if the uploaded image is indeed the picture of the pensioner who is seeking the life certificate. It uses Big Data and Entity Resolution-based demographic matching by extracting the person’s details from the pensioner data base. Entity Resolution is the process of disambiguating manifestations of real world entities in various records or mentions by linking and grouping.  The other key technology used is Deep Learning-based image comparison which compares the input photo with the base photo available, as the former may look very different from the latter owing to the advancing age of the pensioner.

“If all these parameters, including liveness test, demographic name matching and the photo-comparison are passed, it means that the person who has given the photo is a live person and his name and photograph is the same as the one recorded in the pension data base,” says Rao.