KARACHI:
I’m 68 years old. To draw my meagre pension, I have to prove twice a year that I’m still alive. My biometric verification was due last month, but I hadn’t been feeling well, so my account was suspended due to the delay.
On July 13, when I was feeling well enough, I walked to the bank for the verification. Once there, I took a seat, like I always do, to rest. Someone else was sitting in the chair next to me, so I kept my back to them to comply with Covid-19 SOPs as best as I could. But a male employee asked me to change seats. I can’t just get up and get moving, so I had to refuse. Then, a female employee asked me to go to the front desk for the verification. I dragged myself there, but I was told that I should return to the area where I had been seated. There are stairs between these two areas, and the younger lot won’t understand what a nightmare stairs can be until they reach their so-called golden years. Naturally, I lost my patience at the callousness of the employees, who apparently hadn’t been trained in customer service. After some yelling and some tear shedding, I was taken back to the area where I’d been sitting initially. And it’s there that my biometric verification was carried out. Why, then, humiliate an old person by making them run, or rather drag themselves, from pillar to post?
We live in the digital age. Hasn’t any of the relevant officials thought about introducing an app for the elderly so they can give proof of life from the comfort of their homes? Some banks already have a biometric verification feature for their customers in their respective apps, then why not provide a similar facility to pensioners and save them the bi-annual humiliation?
Published in The Express Tribune, July 19th, 2021.
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