Golden oldies sing: No tension over pension

The govt will set up a forum for regulatory coordination and the development of pension products to bring focus on adequacy and sustainability of post-retirement income. Tax breaks have also been introduced for pension investments made on behalf of children.

"This is a big positive. Currently, in addition to National Pension System, there are multiple pension (accumulation) products such as Employee Provident Fund, Public Provident Fund, retirement funds from AMCs, and life insurers with disparate benefit structures and tax treatment," said Sriram Iyer, CEO, HDFC Pension. He added that this multiplicity confuses clients and affects adoption.

"While we will await further details, this move to set up a coordination forum will go a long way in harmonising and adopting client-centric features across all pension products," he said.

"Inclusion of NPS Vatsalya as an eligible investment under 80CCD(1B) in the old tax regime is a positive and should accelerate its adoption and kick-start the journey of building a long-term corpus for the child," said Iyer.