Another 100 million, however, are life time poor. They need direct delivery such as the national social assistance schemes. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh launched the Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme last year, to provide assistance of Rs 200 to every person above 65 years below the poverty line. “The national assistance schemes are not good enough,” admits Swarup. “With a large population, how much can tax money provide?”

To address the needs of this group, public-private partnerships are an option, too. UTI Asset Management Company, for instance, has invested in a pension venture with Sewa, an NGO, and IIEF, Invest India Micro Pension Services (IIMPS), which in 18 months has provided micro pensions to over 145,000 low-income workers in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. Rajasthan too has appointed IIMPS to deliver pensions to 500,000 people. The state plans to co-contribute up to Rs 1,000 per annum per member. Rag pickers, marginal farmers and petty artisans are benefiting from the initiatives, according to IIMPS.

Those covered by the existing formal pension system suffer from inadequate pensions. The Left's mantle of the spoilsport isn't limited to restricting the ambit of the NPS. The stiff opponent of stockmarkets and private fund managers is holding up the efficient running of the largest public provident fund, Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) too. The EPFO paid 8.5 per cent last year, which barely covers the erosion of savings by inflation, now at over 8 per cent. It cannot deliver more because the Left insist its corpus be invested only in government bonds. Between 1979 and 2005, the returns on these have been 7 per cent below equities. “I am a well-informed pension funds participant, yet I am not sure what happened to my pension savings with the EPFO when I switched jobs,” says Ajay Shah, a consultant at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy.

The EPFO does not offer seamless transfers to job hoppers, is not audited, and is extremely opaque. “As the managing director of HDFC AMC, I get the annual statement of funds from the EPFO for the amount we park with it on behalf of employees, but no statement on asset allocation,” says Milind Barve, highlighting the gross inadequacies in the regulations for the EPFO. The EPFO is hardly regulated compared with the mutual fund industry, though its corpus is more than four times larger. The Central Provident Fund Commissioner A. Viswanathan defends the EPFO saying the private fund managers are being invited to manage it. Barve joins Bhardwaj, Shah and other financial industries experts in wanting the NPS to be the vehicle for retirement savings.