Atal Pension Yojana (APY) is the guaranteed pension scheme of Government of India administered by Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA), the pension sector watchdog. The scheme allows any Citizen of India between the age group of 18-40 years to join through the bank or post office branches where one has the savings bank account. Under the scheme, a subscriber would receive a minimum guaranteed pension of Rs.1000 to Rs.5000 per month from the age of 60 years, as per contributions made by him till 60 years. The same pension would be paid to the spouse of the subscriber and on the demise of both the subscriber and spouse, the accumulated pension wealth as accumulated till age 60 of the subscriber is returned to the nominee.
The scheme is distributed through 257 registered APY Service Providers (APY-SPs) consisting of Banks and Post Offices. PFRDA regularly advises all its Service Providers to promote the scheme for ensuring its outreach to the ultimate prospective population. All the APY Service Providers namely, public sector, private sector, regional rural, small finance, payment and cooperative banks have participated with full enthusiasm in the promotional campaigns run by PFRDA throughout the year.
Around 69 lac APY accounts were sourced during the FY 2019-20. Enrolments under APY registered a growth of 20% over the number of APY enrolments during FY 2018-19. This is mainly due to better performance of the State Bank of India, Axis Bank and Airtel Payments Bank during FY 2019-20, in comparison to FY 2018-19.
Shri Supratim Bandyopadhyay, Chairman, PFRDA stated that “It is encouraging to see the growing number of 69 lakhs enrolments under Atal Pension Yojana during the financial year 2019-20. APY as a pension scheme designed for unorganized sector workers has accomplished 2.23 crores coverage of Indian citizens, and we plan to extend this scheme to more than 3 crore unorganized workers by end of this fiscal.”