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Informist, Thursday, Sept. 10, 2026

--PFRDA head: National pension plan can't just be plain vanilla savings pdt

MUMBAI – Hailing innovation in the pension sector, Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority Chairperson Sivasubramanian Ramann said Thursday that the National Pension System cannot be a "plain vanilla" savings plan and must be designed to meet the requirements of old age. The returns must be enough to cover security at old age while ensuring inflation-adjusted gains, he said at the Global fintech Fest 2026. 

According to him, the recently introduced NPS Swasthya, which provides health insurance coverage as an add-on to the pension plan, is getting a good response from the subscribers. "Such products are truly useful in the NPS family so that people engage with those products and that is really the way forward. I see that NPS cannot just be a plain vanilla saving for old age," he said.

Ramann's pitch for better pension products comes amid the lacklustre demand for pension products in India, compared to other financial products like mutual funds. He said the department is making efforts to diversify the investment formula of pension corpus to boost returns, while also making access easier.

In this regard, the pension regulator launched the 'NPS Tatkal' portal Wednesday, which will help onboard new subscribers for the National Pension System through Unified Payment Interfaces, starting with National Payments Corp. of India's BHIM UPI application. So far, five banks--State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, and IDFC FIRST Bank--have joined the plan. Another 12 banks are in the pipeline to be onboarded, Ramann said. 

These initiatives come as pension coverage in India remains inadequate. India's pension system has expanded steadily but overall coverage remains modest relative to the size of the workforce, the Economic Survey for 2025-26 (Apr-Mar) had said. As of Jun. 30, NPS had 22.40 million subscribers with assets under management worth INR 17.27 trillion. 

The government introduced the defined-contribution National Pension System on Jan. 1, 2004, replacing the defined-benefit old pension scheme. Under the NPS, individuals make regular contributions during their working years, with their retirement corpus invested in market-linked instruments. The accumulated corpus is used to provide retirement benefits, including through the purchase of an annuity, subject to applicable laws.

The NPS is mandatory for central government employees, while others may join voluntarily. Ramann said that more ground remains to be covered to have the non-government sector covered under the National Pension System.  End

Reported by Priyasmita Dutta and Sagar Sen

Edited by Akul Nishant Akhoury

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