Chandigarh: Ahead of the assembly elections in Gujarat where AAP is trying to woo voters, Punjab cabinet approved issuance of notification for implementing the Old Pension Scheme (OPS) in the state, claiming it will directly benefit more than 175,000 state government employees.
The cabinet assured that the scheme will be made “self-sustainable from the resources available with the exchequer and under no circumstance, will the future of employees be jeopardized”.
The decision was taken in the meeting of the council of ministers chaired by chief minister Bhagwant Mann. He told media persons after the meeting that the proposal for OPS was approved in the meeting. An official spokesperson later said that in order to ensure that the scheme is financially sustainable for the exchequer in the future, the state government will be contributing proactively towards creation of a pension corpus which will service the pension in future to the beneficiaries of the scheme.
The contribution towards the pension corpus will be £100 million per annum initially and will gradually increase in future. In addition to this, the current accumulated corpus with NPS is £1.67 billion for which the state government will request Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA), Government of India, to refund this amount for effective utilisation at its end.
