Defence Accounts Department Marks 279th Annual Day

Raksha Mantri Rajnath Singh launched a set of digital and financial management initiatives of the Defence Accounts Department (DAD) at its 279th Annual Day, held at DRDO Bhawan in New Delhi. He described the department, which has served for close to three centuries, as the backbone of the country’s defence preparedness.

The three initiatives unveiled

• SAKSHAM integrated with IAFIS: the department’s bill audit and payment system now exchanges budget, sanction and bill information digitally with the Indian Army Financial Information System, allowing paperless processing and real-time visibility of bill status and budget balances
• Treasury Single Account (TSA): inaugurated for just-in-time release of funds to autonomous bodies, it runs on the Payment Routing and Integrated System Management (PRISM) platform and is fully integrated with RBI eKUBER
• Revamped National Compilation System (NCS): the single source for accounting and compilation of all defence expenditure, rebuilt on a new technical architecture for granular reporting to the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Defence, Service Headquarters and field controllers

What the Raksha Mantri said

Rajnath Singh asked for greater integration of the financial systems of the Army, Navy and Air Force and set the goal of maximum digitisation, maximum automation and maximum transparency, with management information system data updated in real time. He urged the department to move from an Annual Review of Balances to an Any Time Review of Balances. Noting the near 100 per cent expenditure in FY 2025-26, he credited the joint work of the department and the three Services. He suggested automating grievance redressal through a conversational artificial intelligence system spanning chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email and phone calls, and pressed for early implementation of SAMPURNA, a fully automated revenue procurement system built on data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Awards and publications

The awards recognised work on the digitisation of the Annual Review of Balances and on projects such as SAKSHAM and SAMAR-SETU. SAMAR-SETU is the centralised application that manages pay and allowances of Agniveers of the Indian Army; run from the Central Agniveer Pay and Accounts Office, it handles the pay accounts of more than 2.3 lakh Agniveers through automated processes.

Who was present

Controller General of Defence Accounts Alka Nangia Arora spoke on the department’s work in centralising and digitising internal audit, payment and accounting, financial advice and defence pensions. Among those who attended were the Defence Secretary, Rajesh Kumar Singh, and Vishvajit Sahay, Secretary (Defence Finance), together with the senior military leadership: General NS Raja Subramani as Chief of Defence Staff, General Dhiraj Seth as Chief of Army Staff, Admiral Krishna Swaminathan as Chief of the Naval Staff and Air Marshal Ashutosh Dixit as Vice Chief of Air Staff.