One reason why the country's Left parties are so opposed to the PFRDA Bill which will allow private sector pension players could be that, once the private sector is in, these players will soon dwarf the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) that is mostly controlled by politically affiliated trade unions. Right now, there are just between 15-20 million individuals who make monthly contributions for their post-retirement life to the EPFO "" at the moment, the value of this corpus is around Rs 150,000 crore and around Rs 10,000 crore gets added to this each year by way of fresh contributions. According to the Invest India Foundation's annual survey on pensions, however, around 80 million individuals wish to make such contributions in case pension funds are allowed to come up. Assuming fairly modest contributions (5 per cent for those earning less than Rs 1 lakh a year, going up to 7.5 per cent in the case of those earning over Rs 2.5 lakh), according to Invest India, if private pension funds are allowed, the corpus will rise to over Rs 190,000 crore in another three years which is roughly what the EPFO's corpus will also be at that point. After that, the corpus of private pension funds will rise dramatically, overshadowing the EPFO completely. One way to ensure this doesn't happen, of course, is to ensure the PFRDA Bill, languishing for around three years now, doesn't get passed. And since voters don't realise it is the Left which is not allowing them to save with pension fund managers of their choice, it doesn't have to face the voters' wrath.
