Despite the strong opposition from the employees of Central /State Governments, teachers, Railways, Defence, Postal and BSNL numbering more than one and half crore, the Central Government is hell bound to pass the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) Bill in the winter session of the Parliament starting from 22nd November 2011. The Bill was introduced in Parliament on 24th March 2011. It has been referred to the Parliamentary Standing Committee of Finance headed by BJP leader Yashwant Singh. The Committee had suggested that there should be a cap of FDI and also that there should be provisions for easy withdrawal from the fund by the concerned employee.
The Cabinet did not agree for a cap in FDI, but has stated that it will be at 26% at present. It gives the power to the government to increase at any time. If a cap was put in the Bill, then it would have been difficult to increase the same without the consent of Parliament as is now the case with Insurance sector. It clearly means that the government wants to increase FDI at the next opportunity by an administrative order.
In the same way, denying withdrawal is also to make available the full funds to the Fund Managers to do whatever they like with the funds uninterrupted.
The Standing Committee has suggested that there should be assured returns to the employees, which also has been rejected by the Cabinet.
It has now become very clear that while pious declarations are made for the benefit of the employees, the Government is implementing its neo-liberal agenda of allowing the huge pension corpus amounting to lakhs of crores of rupees in the hands of Fund Managers and private companies for their benefit. The hard earned money of the employees will be at serious risk.
Once the Parliament enacts the bill, the pension of not only those recruited after 01-01-2004 in the Government services and after 01-10-2000 in BSNL will be adversely affected, even those who are recruited earlier are also in peril.
That is why the entire Central/State government, Railways, Defence, Postal, Teachers and BSNL employees are fighting against this anti-worker bill. At the present juncture it is most important that the Parliament March proposed on 25th November against the PFRDA Bill should made a thumbing success with massive participation. On that day a memorandum signed by lakhs of workers and pensioners will be presented to the President and Prime Minister of India.
There cannot be any compromise to the government’s move to defraud the employees of their hard earned pension.