NPS – Need of Revamping

NPS – Need of Revamping

B. Need of Revamping

It is more than 12 years under NPS Govt. Sector and 6 (six ) year since NPS was introduced in the market to cater to the retirement needs of Private Sector/Unorganised Sector subscribers.

The NPS has made noticeable progress from the time of its inception, on boarding about 1 Crore subscribers with a total AUM exceeding 100000 crores by Dec 2015, with only 12% of the workforce covered by any kind of old age security in India, there is thus a huge untapped potential for NPS to expand.

However, this would require multipronged approach with co-operation of multiple stakeholders including Central Government, State Governments, Autonomous bodies, trade bodies, Regulators and many more.

Besides the expansion in coverage, the provision of old age income security also entails working towards adequacy of income post working life, which can be done by optimizing returns through appropriate investment guidelines.

While devising the investment guidelines, the interest of the subscriber is to be kept paramount, balancing the security aspect with adequacy of returns.

While returns on investment under DC scheme cannot be guaranteed, it is important to frame guidelines, which enable the pension funds to deliver good real rate of returns to the subscriber for meaningful old age income security, which cannot be done with overload of fixed income securities.

Hence, an enabling environment is required to be created for the Subscriber to maximize his/her returns depending upon his/her risk appetite.

The fiscal stimulus being provided by the Government each year through its budget announcements are a major boost to the NPS , propelling the built up of a pensioned society.

The experience gained since last more than decade this has been quite obvious that the NPS system has a well laid out architecture, it has been able to draw enough attention from the individual subscribers by very little marketing and publicity. It is also perceptible that investor awareness towards the various financial products has grown to the extant where subscribers can decide about the mix of asset class and Pension Fund and change the same as per its discretion.