Livelihoods: In an attempt to get more citizens to avail the benefits of the government’s pension scheme—the Atal Pension Yojana (APY), the Centre has listed a series of measures that aims to improve enrolment.
Launched by the central government in May 2015, APY is open to all citizens of India between 18-40 years of age who have a savings account in a bank or post office. Subscribers can accrue benefits of the scheme when they reach 60 years.
To increase enrolment under APY, Minister of State for Finance and Corporate Affairs, Anurag Singh Thakur, listed out measures being taken by the Government. Some of these include:
- Subscribers can now contribute either monthly, quarterly, and half-yearly, as opposed to just the mandatory monthly payment schedule earlier. This keeps in mind the income variability of seasonal income earners.
- Subscribers can upgrade or downgrade their pension amount at any time during the financial year. Earlier this could be done just once a year.
- To ease the onboarding of APY subscribers, an alternate paper-less mode for a bank’s existing savings account customers has been approved by the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority.
- Citizens can now access the scheme via the APY app, which has been made live on Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance (UMANG) platform.
- A grievance module has been made available for APY subscribers.
- Training will be conducted for bank branch officials in order to build their knowledge of this scheme.
Under the scheme, the government has disbursed INR 57,078.22 lakh as a co-contribution till February 2021.
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