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| PFRDA to reach out to industry chambers for enrolling companies |
| Vrishti Beniwal / New Delhi Jan 12, 2010, 00:50 IST |
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The Pension Fund Regulatory Development Authority (PFRDA) is planning to reach out to industry chambers and associations to get their members into the new pension system (NPS).
“We will speak to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci), Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) and Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) to explore the possibility of educating private companies about the benefits of joining NPS,” a PFRDA official said.
Since the opening of NPS to the non-government sector in May 2009, PFRDA has got only 3,000 customers. It is expecting the numbers would go up when corporates start showing interest in NPS.
PFRDA will also write to the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) to sell NPS to the huge software sector workforce in India. It had spoken to the software body last year as well, but failed to receive any response at that time.
The official said the pension regulator was planning to meet other associations also, in order to make NPS popular among private sector employees. It is sending its officials to companies in various parts of the country to give presentation on NPS.
“Apart from ministries and autonomous bodies under them, the idea is to have a model for corporates as well as government employees. The General Insurance Company has also shown interest. It will bring to us a substantial number of employees working in general insurance companies,” said the official.
PFRDA’s board had also given its nod to corpus management in 2008 after the State Bank of India and Himachal Road Transport Corporation gave proposals for managing corpus of their employees. However, none of the companies has come forward for this yet. SBI is now saying their trustees have to agree to it. NPS’ total subscribers, including the government sector have touched 680,000. PFRDA is expecting the total number of subscribers to reach 1,000,000 by July 2010 as many people are likely to join the scheme with the introduction of Tier-II withdrawable account on December 1, 2009.
Besides, NPS will become cheaper for customers as PFRDA will soon invite expression of interest for a second central record-keeping agency (CRA). CAMS, Karvy and CDSL have already shown interest in becoming CRA.
“By the end of 2010 we should have a second CRA. It will give rise to competition and NSDL will also be forced to bring down its charges to match them with the other CRA,” the official added.
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