The trade unions have been pressing for higher minimum monthly pension under the EPS-95. Initially, they had proposed to provide at least Rs 3,000 per month to pensioners under the scheme. Later factoring in rise on cost of living index, some of them also demanded a minimum monthly pension of Rs 5,000 and even higher amounts under the scheme.

Among top 10 industry classification, Computer and IT services category along with Electrical, Mechanical or General Engineering Products category registered highest month-on-month growth of around 40 per cent as compared to previous month with 42,205 and 77,392 net additions for January 2021, respectively.

This was followed by Trading & Commercial establishments category with 82,238 net payroll additions registering 27 per cent growth as compared to previous month.

As of February 28, 2021, total pension assets under management stood at Rs 5,59,594 crore, showing a year-on-year growth of 33.09 per cent, PFRDA said.

“Apart from NPS and Atal Pension Yojana (APY), we propose to have some innovative products to attract more and more customers. The first product that we are targeting is a product which will have a minimum assured return,” Bandyopadhyay said.

As per the practice, the CBT decision on interest rate would be send to the finance ministry for concurrence. After getting the finance ministry’s nod, the 8.5 per cent rate of interest for this fiscal would be credited into the EPFO subscribers’ accounts.

Giving a break-up of the types of subscribers under the National Pension System(NPS), PFRDA said central government employees subscriber base rose 3.74 per cent to 21.61 lakh, while state government employees base increased 7.44 per cent to 50.43 lakh at end-January 2021.

For the ‘all citizen sector’ category, the subscriber base under NPS jumped 31.72 per cent to 14.95 lakh, while for the corporate sector it rose 17.71 per cent to 10.90 lakh.