Pfrda expects APY to have over 1-cr subscribers by March

Pension funds regulator PFRDA is hopeful that subscriber base of the Atal Pension Yojana (APY) will cross the 1-crore-mark by March from around 60 lakh now, a top official said.
The scheme was launched by government a couple of years ago and is available for people falling in the 18-40 age bracket.
The subscriber base of the National Pension Scheme (NPS) is likely to rise around 27 per cent whereas its investment corpus may grow 47 per cent this year, he added.
"We hope that the APY subscriber base will cross the 1-crore-mark from around 60 lakh now," Pfrda chairman Hemant Contractor told PTI here today.

The scheme has already registered a 100 per cent growth in terms of subscribers in the past fiscal year and its assets under management stands at Rs 3,000 crore now, he said.
The NPS subscriber base grew 27 per cent in FY17, and its investment corpus jumped 47 per cent.

At present, NPS has a subscriber base of 16.67 million and investment corpus of Rs 1.98 trillion.
"We expect both the subscriber base as well as the investment corpus of NPS to go up this year building on the growth they had registered last fiscal year," Contractor said.
On the annual returns given by various investments made by NPS in FY17, he said equity investment yielded 18 per cent, corporate bonds and government securities returned 12 per cent and 9-10 per cent respectively.

Thus, NPS gave an average return of over 10 per cent which is better than that of fixed deposits with banks which only pay around 8 per cent, he said.