CONRAD DIAS
Ranchi, May 11: The National Pension Scheme (NPS) is a voluntary retirement savings scheme that allows subscribers to make defined contributions toward planned savings, ensuring their future in the form of a pension.
It is an attempt to find a long-term solution to the challenge of providing sufficient retirement income to all Indian citizens.
In Jharkhand, there were around 1,72,000 self-employed workers in the financial year 2019, as per the official data. However, out of these, only 574 persons have enrolled themselves for NPS.
The employees of a corporate entity who are enrolled by the company and have Indian citizenship between the ages of 18 and 60 are eligible to become NPS subscribers if they meet the KYC requirements.
NPS provides a variety of investment options as well as a selection of Pension Funds (PFs) to help plan and track the growth of assets and the pension corpus. Subscribers have the option of switching from one investment option to another, as well as from one fund manager to another.
Despite all these benefits, the majority of self-employed people in Jharkhand have not enrolled themselves in this scheme.
One of the main reasons is that many private companies provide PF as an option and are unaware of the scheme provided by the government, as informed by the official from Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA).
The central government scrapped the old pension scheme on January 1, 2004, and introduced the National Pension System (NPS).
As of February 2022, more than 50 lakh employees of state governments were under NPS, whereas more than 22 lakh central employees are its beneficiaries.
However, things are not the same for the self-employed workers and PFRDA is planning to take necessary initiatives in the future to give benefits to self-employed workers.
