Government employees may soon open National Pension System account through eNPS

At present, the government sector employees are registered under the National Pension System (NPS) either through submission of physical form to the Central Record Keeping Agency (CRA) or through the Online PRAN Generation Module (OPGM) adopted by the Nodal Offices of the government. Now, Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) is exploring the possibility to enable e-NPS platform as an additional option to government sector employees to facilitate their online onboarding under NPS. The online opening of the NPS is called eNPS account opening.

Accordingly, the employees of the government sector will have an option to register under NPS through e-NPS. Further, an existing Subscriber of other sectors. on entering into the Government sector, shall have an option to shift to the Government sector through e-NPS.

e-NPS is the online NPS onboarding portal hosted by the CRA wherein a Subscriber can register and contribute online into NPS. Through eNPS, a Subscriber can register under NPS, generate a Permanent Retirement Account Number (PRAN) under All Citizens of India and Corporate Sectors.

Further, the Subscribers who have already been registered under NPS across sectors with active PRAN can make contributions through eNPS as well as activate their Tier II account. The prospective NPS Subscribers under private sector can register in e-NPS either through `Aadhaar Offline e-KYC’ or through ‘PAN & Bank Account’

Benefits of e-NPS account opening

The proposed mode of e-NPS based registration of Government Sector employees bring the following benefits to the stakeholders:

i. Ease of onboarding for employees and online verification/authorization of employee by nodal officers.

ii. Paperless process of enrollment with e-Sign/OTP.

iii. Easing the work of Nodal officers from manual process of Acct opening and freeing them from handling papers and associated challenges of dispatching the physical forms to CRA.

iv. Optimizing the cost of Acct opening by end to end digitization.

v. Expediting the account opening process compared to existing modes of account opening methods made available to the Government sector.

vi. Timely PRAN generation and hence timely deposit of NPS contribution which would lead to higher investment benefits.

vii. Since the employees fill the data in e-NPS portal themselves while on-boarding, data entry error may come down and consequently the decline in rejection of forms.