- March 27, 2024
Atal pension plan ‘coercive’, says Jairam, finance minister returns fire | India News – Times of India
NEW DELHI: In a faceoff on micro-blogging platform X, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Congress MP Jairam Ramesh traded charges over the Atal Pension Yojana, with govt dismissing charges of coercion and enrollment of beneficiaries without their consent.
It all began on Tuesday morning with Ramesh citing a study by the Indian Council of Social Science Research to suggest that nearly a third of the beneficiaries of the scheme launched by the Modi govt were enrolled by bankers without their “explicit permission” so that targets could be met.Describing it as a poorly-designed scheme, he also said that returns were not attractive.
Sitharaman shot back accusing Ramesh of “using verbal sophistry to hide facts” and of “being malicious or ignorant of the basic tenets of designing a good pension scheme”. She said the scheme is designed to “automatically continue premium payment unless the subscriber opts out” instead of annually opting in.
She said the scheme comes with a guaranteed return of 8% and the idea is to target the poor and lower middle class – a remark meant to counter the allegation that most APY beneficiaries were in the lowest income-bracket.
The head of Congress’s communication unit came back to argue that Sitharaman had “admitted” that APY was coercive and that the scheme guaranteed Rs 1,000 pension for a majority of subscribers, starting 2035.
“Keep in mind, a Rs 1,000 per month pension in 2035 is equivalent to just Rs 617 per month in 2024 prices (assuming a continuation of Modi-era inflation rates). This is the kind of erosion of value that makes APY a poorly-designed scheme,” he tweeted.
In the evening, FM responded, calling Ramesh a “spin doctor” and asserted that an account is only opened after obtaining explicit consent from the subscriber, with an exit scheme also in place. She said Ramesh’s allegations were based on “cherry-picked” data and cited the study’s finding to say that only 38 out of the 2,461 respondents, only 1.5% of the sample, have a “perception of (their) account being opened without consent”.
She said since inception, the scheme had given 9.1% return and argued that UPA’s Swavalambhan scheme for unorganised sector workers could get 35 lakh beneficiaries in four years, compared to APY’s 6.4 crore in nine years.
It all began on Tuesday morning with Ramesh citing a study by the Indian Council of Social Science Research to suggest that nearly a third of the beneficiaries of the scheme launched by the Modi govt were enrolled by bankers without their “explicit permission” so that targets could be met.Describing it as a poorly-designed scheme, he also said that returns were not attractive.
Sitharaman shot back accusing Ramesh of “using verbal sophistry to hide facts” and of “being malicious or ignorant of the basic tenets of designing a good pension scheme”. She said the scheme is designed to “automatically continue premium payment unless the subscriber opts out” instead of annually opting in.
She said the scheme comes with a guaranteed return of 8% and the idea is to target the poor and lower middle class – a remark meant to counter the allegation that most APY beneficiaries were in the lowest income-bracket.
The head of Congress’s communication unit came back to argue that Sitharaman had “admitted” that APY was coercive and that the scheme guaranteed Rs 1,000 pension for a majority of subscribers, starting 2035.
“Keep in mind, a Rs 1,000 per month pension in 2035 is equivalent to just Rs 617 per month in 2024 prices (assuming a continuation of Modi-era inflation rates). This is the kind of erosion of value that makes APY a poorly-designed scheme,” he tweeted.
In the evening, FM responded, calling Ramesh a “spin doctor” and asserted that an account is only opened after obtaining explicit consent from the subscriber, with an exit scheme also in place. She said Ramesh’s allegations were based on “cherry-picked” data and cited the study’s finding to say that only 38 out of the 2,461 respondents, only 1.5% of the sample, have a “perception of (their) account being opened without consent”.
She said since inception, the scheme had given 9.1% return and argued that UPA’s Swavalambhan scheme for unorganised sector workers could get 35 lakh beneficiaries in four years, compared to APY’s 6.4 crore in nine years.
