Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma launched the Pensioner’s Life Certificate app using Face Recognition on July 15, 2021, via video conferencing.

Life Certificate Verification is a process in which the Pensioners (Service/Family) of the state government have to appear in front of the Treasury Officer or Pension Disbursing Authority to prove that they are still alive to receive the pension.

The pensioner can do this either by Paper-based Life Certificate, Physical Appearance, Biometric Fingerprint verification system using Kiosk or Jeevan Pramaan.

However, to avail of most of these services, the pensioner has to visit the Treasury Office. This posed a hindrance and inconvenience to pensioners due to old age, sickness and taking the travel to Treasury Offices.

Further, the current pandemic situation added to the difficulties of a pensioner for live verification.

To overcome these difficulties and to make services easier for a pensioner, NIC in collaboration with the Finance Department, Government of Meghalaya has developed this Pensioner's Life Certificate App called ‘The Pensioner’s Life Certificate Verification’.

This app will offer pensioners a secure, easy and hassle-free interface for verifying their liveness to the Pension Disbursing Authorities from the comfort of their homes using smartphones.

The App uses DEEP LEARNING Artificial Intelligence technology whereby it can detect the liveness of a pensioner from real-time photographs of living pensioners and the pensioner’s identity will then be verified with the help of Face Verification Technology.

The AI algorithms used will learn through experience and with time it will increase in its capabilities of Face Verification as well as Liveness Detection.

All the photographs captured are stored in a local server, not outside the State or the country. The whole exercise has been closely monitored by the Chief Secretary to ensure ease of use of the App by old-age pensioners.

"The app has come where and when it is needed the most considering the fact that the pensioners are elderly people who have difficulties in travelling for services especially in these times of COVID," said the chief minister.

The App can be downloaded from the Google Play store using the link https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.plc.meg and very shortly it will be available in the Apple apps store for iOS users.