New Delhi, Oct. 1 -- Subscribers' savings under the National Pension System (NPS) will soon be deployed straight into large-scale infrastructure works, with the pension regulator setting a two-year timeline for permitting such investments, PFRDA Chairperson S Ramann said.
The objective is to commit part of the long-horizon corpus held by retirement savers to assets that take years to mature and generate returns, he indicated.
A committee has been set up by the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) to study the direct route.
This would run parallel to the indirect avenues the regulator already intends to use, namely alternative investment funds, real estate investment trusts and infrastructure investment trusts.
Under a proposed facility called NPS Tatkal, users will be able to open accounts and contribute through their existing bank accounts using UPI.
Small traders, gig and informal workers and those running their own businesses are the intended audience. Common Service Centres will help extend access in underserved areas. Ramann also set a 2047 target for every Jan Dhan account holder to have a linked NPS account.
Last December, PFRDA had eased its investment norms, opening NPS portfolios to a wider set of instruments including gold and silver ETFs, alternative funds and InvITs.
Alongside the investment push, the regulator wants to bring roughly three crore more people into the scheme within two years, with digital enrolment as the main lever, according to Ramann.
Two further products are planned. NPS Sanchay would act as the default plan for subscribers outside government service, while NPS Swasthya pairs a pension account with a family floater top-up health cover, for which operating guidelines came out on September 18.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.