Nadra to verify pensioners under revised SOPs

Official data shows that Pakistan has 1,848,151 civilian pensioners, including 399,058 federal government pensioners, 225,112 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 320,754 from Sindh, 100,528 from Balochistan, 51,641 from Azad Jammu and Kashmir, 16,005 from Gilgit-Baltistan, 610,823 from Punjab and 124,230 Pakistan Railways pensioners.

The number of military pensioners stands at 1,326,500, bringing the total number of pensioners across the country to more than three million.

Ministry of Finance to the Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan and the Controller General of Accounts (CGA), the federal government has formally eliminated the role of commercial banks in standard banking biometric verification and POLC validation in pursuance of the prime minister’s directives.

Nadra has been integrated with the CGA and Military Accountant General (MAG) through a secure application programming interface (API), enabling Digital Life Signals to be transmitted directly from Nadra to the CGA and MAG while bypassing commercial banking channels.

Under the revised arrangement, banks will function solely as Pension Disbursement Agencies and will have no statutory or administrative responsibility for the verification, collection, retention or validation of POLC or biometric data under normal circumstances. Banks may, however, act as authorised operational conduits through Nadra’s designated system for POLC generation.

The revised SOP also states that pension disbursing accounts cannot be rendered dormant for the processing or disbursement of pension payments, with standard bank dormancy requirements not applicable to these accounts. The revised SOP supersedes all previous procedures and formally abolishes the physical “Disburser’s Half” process, as federal pensions are now disbursed exclusively through the Direct Credit System.