January 2022

India’s jobs crisis is more serious than it seems

Jitendra Maurya was one of more than 10,000 jobless young people who turned up for interviews for 15 low-skilled government jobs in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. Many of them were overqualified - aspirants, according to one report, included post-graduates, engineers, MBAs and people like Maurya, who is preparing for a judge's exam, according to a BBC report. "The situation is such that sometimes there is no money to buy books. So I thought I will get some work [here],"...

December 2021

India’s expanding gig economy must treat workers fairly

The gig economy and its growing fault lines between gig employees and platform companies are in the news again, with 50 women “partners" of Urban Company’s (UC) salon and spa vertical protesting against policy changes that will come into effect from January. These, they claim, will affect their ability to earn and are therefore “unfair labour practices". The company, India’s largest home-services provider, has filed a lawsuit in Gurugram’s district court against the protests. The judgement in this case...

PinBox pushes to bring more global workers into retirement savings tent

Gautam Bhardwaj is aiming to get 100 million workers in the informal sectors of India's economy — from Uber drivers to farmers to domestic servants — to start saving for retirement over the next five years. For the co-founder and director of Singapore-based pension-tech provider pinBox Solutions Pte. Ltd., that amounts to a quick pivot from an initial success in Rwanda — where in close collaboration with the government, pinBox helped 1.5 million informal sector workers, a quarter of that...

Old-Age Pensions and Female Labour Supply in India

By Vidhya of Unnikrishnan & Kunal Sen Whether cash transfers have unintended behavioural effects on the recipient household’s labour supply is of considerable policy interest. We examine the impact’ of the Indira Gandhi National Old-Age Pension Scheme (IGNOAPS) on prime-age women’s labour supply decisions in India, where female labour force participation continues to decline over time. We use propensity score matching (PSM) to make households with IGNOAPS recipients comparable with program non-recipients. Further, we use individual fixed effects (FE) to...

November 2021

India's fertility rate falls below replacement level. What it means.

India’s fertility rate falls below replacement level. What it means.

India's national Total Fertility Rate (TFR) has fallen below 2.0 for the first time, as per the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS). The findings covered 11 states and three union territories that were not included in the first set of data released in December 2020. The latest set of findings of the NFHS 2019-21 survey released by the Union Health Ministry on Wednesday revealed that the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime has dropped...

India’s informal economy more than halved

The Reserve Bank of India’s digital payments index also captures the spread of digital, taking into account growth in the payments infrastructure. Of the four key objectives of demonetisation, India appears to have done well on three. There has been a rise in digital transactions. Besides this, there has also been a drop in fake currencies. Counterfeit notes detected continued to fall from 3.1 lakh in FY19 to 2.9 lakh in FY20 and 2 lakh in FY21. There are also...

India:Govt looks into inclusive system for retirement income

The central government is considering launching a drive to provide retirement benefit cover to nearly 380m people in the uncovered workforce in the country, so as to narrow the gap between higher life expectancy and lack of retirement income support. Inter-ministerial consultations are taking place on how to achieve this goal. “The idea is everyone should be in one of the schemes,” an official told The Financial Express. Currently, around 120m workers, the bulk of whom in the organised sector, enjoy...

October 2021

India’s pension system needs impetus to ensure adequate retirement income: study

India needs to undertake strategic reforms to revamp the pension system so as to ensure adequate retirement income, revealed the 2021 Mercer CFA Global Pension Index survey (MCGPI) released on Tuesday. The Indian pension system ranked 40th on the overall index ranking out of 43 systems and had the lowest rank in the adequacy sub-index. The primary objective of this annual survey by Mercer Consulting, a leading global management consulting firm, is to benchmark each retirement income system using more...

Pension Fund Management Software Market to Witness Huge Growth by 2026: Oracle, Visma, Aquila Software

Advance Market Analytics published a new research publication on “Pension Fund Management Software Market Insights, to 2026” with 232 pages and enriched with self-explained Tables and charts in presentable format. In the Study you will find new evolving Trends, Drivers, Restraints, Opportunities generated by targeting market associated stakeholders. The growth of the Pension Fund Management Software market was mainly driven by the increasing R&D spending across the world. Some of the key players profiled in the study are: Oracle Corporation (United...

September 2021

India. PFRDA proposes changes in premature exit rules for Atal Pension Yojana, facilitates timely payment of money

By Navneet Dubey To increase acceptability of Atal Pension Yojana (APY) scheme among informal sector workers, the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) has proposed modifications in premature exit processing for the benefit of subscribers. APY is a social security scheme administered by PFRDA through banks and the department of post. The scheme offers guaranteed pension benefits to eligible citizens after reaching the age of 60 years, who subscribe and contribute to the scheme. According to a PFRDA circular issued on...