New Delhi: In a bid to expand the pension coverage in India, particularly Atal Pension Yojna (APY), the national pension regulator Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) has set a target to add about 6 lakh new accounts in next three months.
Talking to the Millennium Post, PFRDA chairman Hemant G Contractor emphasised on the need to increase pension coverage by terming it as a tool to save hard earned money.
"We have started a campaign to expand the pension coverage in 10 states starting from Uttar Pradesh as the state is biggest and has 17,000 active branches of different banks and post offices."
The PFRDA has set a target to add at least 10 new accounts per active account in Uttar Pradesh. The other states where the campaign would be launched include Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, West Bengal, Odisha, etc.
"We are hopeful that about 1,00,000 new APY accounts would be opened in Uttar Pradesh from 17,000 active bank branches. Similarly, from other states on an average about 50,000 new accounts would be opened under the drive," the PFRDA official said, adding that the pension subscription drive in Uttar Pradesh would be completed in next few days, while the drive in other states would get completed in next three months.
Besides the new initiatives such as introducing e-NPS, reducing minimum contribution levels and withdrawal time limit, new investment instruments and aggressive life cycle funds, the PFRDA has now taken a further step in this direction by increasing the incentives payable to POPs.
While spelling out the performance PFRDA, the chairman said, "As on March 31, the total asset under management (AUM) by all the eight fund managers stood at Rs 1.75 lakh crore, which grew to Rs 2.06 lakh crore as on September 30."
"The subscriber base of the pension schemes run by the PFRDA has been growing, mainly driven by growth in user base every day. The overall subscriber base of the pension regulator was 1.81 crore as on October 31. There were 1.54 crore subscribers by the end of fiscal ended March 2017," he maintained.
The PFRDA chairman has also called for examining sustainability of high returns of over 10 per cent to government employee NPS subscribers at a time when interest rates are in decline.
SBI Pension Funds, UTI Retirement Solutions and LIC Pension Fund Ltd are the three government-managed pension funds hired by the PFRDA that offers returns in the range of 10.16-10.52 per cent to central government employees.
"On the sustainability of returns, we have been talking to the government because now the interest rates are coming down. So, the returns that we get on debt instruments would come down," Contractor said, adding, "Therefore, we do need to look at instruments like life cycle funds in order to broadbase the investment and get better returns. We do need to restructure."