Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh addresses the Defence Accounts Department (DAD) Day 2026 event, in New Delhi on Thursday.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday suggested to the Defence Accounts Department (DAD) to move away from ‘annual review’ to ‘any time review’ of the budget, with real-time data enabling timely and informed decision-making.

Launching key digital and financial management initiatives at Defence Accounts Department’s 279th Annual Day Celebration, Singh also advocated that their approach must be firm, fair, sensitive and responsible, especially when dealing with the legitimate dues and service rights of personnel who have devoted their lives to defending the nation.

During his address, the Minister called for greater integration of financial systems of the Army, Navy and Air Force and stressed upon maximum digitisation, automation and transparency, with real-time updating of Management Information System data.

Digitisation

He also appreciated ‘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. It uses the latest tech-stack with secure role-based access, enhanced validations and scalability, supporting the Department’s move towards “One Nation, One Function, One Application”. He praised it’s integration with the Indian Army Financial Information System for budget, approval and bill data.

Highlighting the near 100 per cent expenditure during FY 2025–26, Singh lauded the joint efforts of DAD and all three Services to achieve this milestone.

On “Sparsh” data cleaning, the Defence 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. “Our approach must be firm, fair, sensitive and responsible, especially when dealing with the legitimate dues and service rights of those who have devoted their lives to defending the nation,” he said.

The Minister 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 Ministry of Defence.

Published on October 1, 2026