ABSTRACT
The New Pension Scheme (or NPS), the design of which we describe in this chapter, is one response to the demographic challenges described in the preceding chapters. The government introduced the NPS for its civil servants in 2004, and issued a directive in 2008, expanding the scheme on a voluntary basis to all Indian citizens. The latter program opened in May 2009 but has developed very slowly. Recent developments, described at the end of the chapter, may accelerate scheme participants. In the two chapters which follow, we provide analysis and offer recommendations pertaining to the scheme’s design (Chapter 4) and its institutional and regulatory framework (Chapter 5).
