Hemant Contractor, chairman of the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA), which regulates the National Pension System (NPS) with a corpus of close to Rs 2 lakh crore, says that it has managed to get over 10 per cent returns for its 1.67 crore subscribers in the past 8 years. In an interview with GEORGE MATHEW, Contractor, who was earlier the managing director of State Bank of India (SBI), spoke about the new plans and initiatives of the regulator. Edited excerpts:
What are your plans to expand the pension scheme? Have you worked out the auto-enrolment system?
Auto-enrolment is a concept which is popular in the UK and New Zealand, among other countries. These are voluntary schemes. What happens is that if a sector is covered under auto-enrolment, all the people working in that sector will automatically get covered under the pension scheme unless they chose to opt out. This has been tried out successfully in some countries. We feel that in India also there is a scope. This proposal is now with the government. This is mostly for the unorganised sector.
