Source: Reuters
The number of subscribers under government-run pension schemes NPS and APY rose nearly 22 per cent to 4.05 crore at January-end this year, according to data from PFRDA.
There were over 3.33 crore subscribers under both the schemes by the year-ago same period.
It shows a year-on-year increase of 21.63 per cent, the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) said in a release on its website onFriday.
Under Atal Pension Yojana (APY), there was an increase of 31.17 per cent in the subscriber base to 2.65 crore at January-end 2021 as against 2.02 crore in the year-ago period, showed the PFRDA data.
Giving a break-up of the types of subscribers under the National Pension System(NPS), PFRDA said central government employees subscriber base rose 3.74 per cent to 21.61 lakh, while state government employees base increased 7.44 per cent to 50.43 lakh at end-January 2021.
For the ‘all citizen sector’ category, the subscriber base under NPS jumped 31.72 per cent to 14.95 lakh, while for the corporate sector it rose 17.71 per cent to 10.90 lakh.
PFRDA said registration is not permitted under the NPS Lite category from April 1, 2015. The number of subscribers under NPS Lite category stands at 43.07 lakh at January-end 2021. NPS Lite was designed with the intention of securing the future of people who are economically disadvantaged.
“As on 31st January 2021, total pension assets under management stood at Rs 5,56,410 crore showing a year-on-year growth of 35.94 per cent,” PFRDA said.
The two flagship schemes — NPS and APY — of PFRDA are targeted at the organised and the unorganised sector employees respectively.
The defined contribution based NPS is a voluntary retirement savings scheme. The savings generated from NPS are pooled into a pension fund which in turn are invested by PFRDA regulated fund managers into diversified portfolios such as government bonds, bills, corporate bonds as well as shares.
It has two categories of account, tier I and tier II. Tier I is a non-withdrawable permanent retirement account while, tier II is a voluntary withdrawable account which is allowed only upon having an active tier I account.
APY caters to those segments of employees who do not have any statutory social security scheme and who are not income tax payers. Subscribers can get a fixed minimum pension of Rs 1,000 to a maximum of Rs 5,000 per month, at the age of 60 years, depending on their contributions.
To encourage people to subscribe to APY, the Centre also made a provision to co-contribute 50 per cent of the total contribution or Rs 1,000 per annum, whichever was lower for a period of five years from 2015-2019, who joined APY before December 31, 2015. The scheme was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in May 2015.
