NEW DELHI: Defence minister Rajnath Singh Thursday called for greater integration of financial systems of Army, Navy and Air Force and stressed maximum digitisation, automation and transparency, with real-time updating of management information system data.Calling the Defence Accounts Department (DAD) the backbone of the country’s defence preparedness, he asked the department to transition from “annual review of balances” to “any time review of balances”. Rajnath launched various publications and digital initiatives during the celebration of the department’s 279th annual day.Highlighting near 100% expenditure during FY 2025–26, Rajnath lauded the joint efforts of DAD and all three services to achieve this milestone.Rajnath also commended Saksham, DAD’s project for digitising and integrating the defence accounting and payment ecosystem hosted on a secure dedicated data centre and operating on the DAD WAN network.Referring to the success of Sparsh data cleaning, the minister suggested automating grievance redressal through a conversational AI ecosystem covering chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email and phone calls. He also emphasised quality audit, digital data cleaning, and prompt resolution of grievances and court cases.He stressed early implementation of SAMPURNA, a fully automated, end-to-end revenue procurement system envisaged to leverage data analytics, AI and machine learning for a valuable decision-support system.Rajnath also unveiled three major initiatives aimed at strengthening the integration of financial information systems of the defence forces, improving accounting and tracking of defence expenditure and operationalising the treasury single account (TSA) system in the defence ministry: SAKSHAM bill audit and payment system of the DAD has been successfully integrated with the Indian Army financial information system (IAFIS), facilitating digital transmission of budget, sanction and bill information between the two organisations. The integration is a major step towards complete digitisation of the defence payments ecosystem, enabling real-time sharing of information on bill status and budget balances and completely paperless processing of bills.The treasury single account (TSA) system was also inaugurated by the minister for just-in-time release of funds to autonomous bodies under the govt. Operationalised through the payment routing and integrated system management (PRISM) platform, the system is fully integrated with RBI eKUBER. It will facilitate better grant management for autonomous bodies under the defence ministry and provide greater visibility of accounting and expenditure.Rajnath also launched the revamped National Compilation System (NCS) for Defence, which is the single source for accounting and compilation of all defence expenditure in India.
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