The chairman of Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) Deepak Mohanty on Friday (January 5) said he is optimistic about reaching the target of pension fund assets under management totaling ₹12 lakh crore by the end of March. Earlier, PFRDA had changed its target of assets under management from ₹11 lakh crore in September 2023.
In a press conference, Mohanty emphasised that the pension fund AUM target is achievable, as it has been observed over the years that the numbers have risen more in the last quarter or “the saving season”.
The total corpus of various schemes under the National Pension System (NPS) and Atal Pension Yojana has increased to ₹10.9 lakh crore--a 27.9% increase YoY as of December 30, told Mohanty.
Out of this, ₹1.5 lakh crore belonged to corporate employees, ₹5.4 lakh crore to state government, and ₹3.1 to central government employees. At the end of the last fiscal, the authority’s corpus increased 22% YoY to ₹9 lakh crore.
Until December 30, the total number of subscribers to various pension schemes stood at 70.3 million–an increase of 16% YoY. This included 52.9 million subscribers to the Atal Pension Yojana, the corpus under which was ₹33 thousand crores as of December 30, as per the data released by the authority.
Mohanty also pointed out that PFRDA is trying to lessen the journey time through technological intervention for online subscribers even as the authority is witnessing a plunge in online subscriptions, as per Informist. To increase the penetration of pension plans, the authority has partnered with regional rural banks and public sector enterprises.
The authority's net invested contribution rose 22.3% on year to ₹7.68 lakh crore. The average annual return on equity investment of the pension corpus was 24.2% as of Dec 29, as compared to 8.2% on government securities and 7.4% on corporate bonds, a release showed.
Just slightly more than 17% of the ₹10.9 lakh crore corpus possessed by the authority is in equity, with the remaining portion being debt. A small chunk of the corpus is also invested in alternate investment funds, real estate investment trusts (REITs), infrastructure investment trusts (InvITs), and green bonds.
(Edited by : Jomy Jos Pullokaran)
