PFRDA revamps NPS to ease investments

In an attempt to promote investments and ease the investment process in the National Pension Scheme (NPS) by improving the operational efficiency of NPS, the pension fund regulator PFRDA announced various revisions and addition of facilities on July 6. 

PFRDA has introduced a digitised APY, thus doing away with the physical application forms and switching to the online platform for form submission by the subscribers. The subscribers will have to submit the forms through eNPS platform that only accepted NPS subscription earlier. 

The regulator has also introduced a bilingual category of the eNPS module providing the subscribers with an option of both Hindi and English to choose from.   Besides, the mandatory requirement for NPS subscribers with Aadhaar to submit the physical application has been scrapped off, with the introduction of eSign facility (Aadhaar e-KYC), enabling subscribers to sign in with the permanent retirement account number through the electronic platform.    
 
The investment in NPS has also been made cheaper post the appointment of Karvy Computershare by PFRDA as the second Central Recordkeeping Agency (CRA) that quotes a lower annual maintenance fees, lesser transaction charges and account opening charges.

In addition, the NPS subscribers may even modify investment choices and asset allocation twice in every financial year. Moreover, the PFRDA allowed the pension fund managers to make an investment of up to 5 per cent of NPS corpus in Real estate investment trusts (REITs) and Infrastructure Investment Trust (InvITs) as well.