Swavalamban Co-contributory Pension Scheme

The Union Budget, 2010-2011, announced “Swavalamban,” a new initiative, to encourage people from the unorganised sector to save for their retirement voluntarily. This is to be administered by the Interim Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA). It is expected that about 10 lakh NPS subscribers of the unorganised sector would benefit from the scheme..

Eligibility

• Family members of SHG members and people from the unorganised sector.
• The member should be in the age group of 18 -50 years.

Premium

Non members who wish to join and those who are not a part of any statutory pension scheme of the Government shall contribute between Rs. 1000 and Rs. 12000/- per annum, and the Central Government shall contribute Rs. 1000 per annum to such subscribers. This contribution by the Central Government shall be available for the current financial year and three years thereafter.

Benefits

The contributions of the subscribers under Swavalamban would be collected by agencies, such as, Government agencies or NGOs, in flexible instalments on monthly or quarterly basis. The contributions of subscribers would be invested in the financial instruments and the returns and the contributions would be used to build the pension corpus of the subscribers. The subscriber could be eligible to get pension from a life insurance company at age 60 by using 40% of the pension corpus. However, if the amount of pension corpus is not sufficient to get a minimum amount of pension of Rs. 1000 per month, then the percentage of pension corpus would be increased so that the pension amount becomes Rs. 1,000 per month, failing which the entire pension corpus would be used to get pension