The meeting of the tripartite Central Board of Trustees (CBT) of retirement fund body EPFO began and ended on a stormy note on Tuesday with all trade union members, including the RSS-backed Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, walking out and staging a sit-in outside the premises.
They were protesting against the Finance Ministry notification allowing unclaimed provident fund (PF) money to be diverted towards a Senior Citizens’ Welfare Fund, which was circulated in the meeting.
“How can the Finance Ministry, which does not contribute a single penny to the EPFO corpus, take away workers’ money to build a social security corpus? Why doesn’t it go for a separate allocation for it,” Ramen Pandey, a CBT member and National Secretary, Indian National Trade Union Congress, told
The RSS-affiliated Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh also supported the unions on the issue. “It is workers’ money and no one can touch it. We will ask the Finance Minister and the Prime Minister to look into the issue,” said Virjesh Upadhyay, General Secretary, BMS and a CBT member. However, employee representatives are in a minority (only 10 out of 43 members) in the CBT.
Later, Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya assured the union leaders that he would write to the Finance Ministry requesting withdrawal of the notification, Pandey said.
According to a Finance Ministry notification on March 18, deposits unclaimed for over seven years in the employees’ provident fund, public provident fund, post office savings accounts, national savings certificates among other small savings schemes would be diverted for setting up a Senior Citizens’ Welfare Fund, announced in the Budget. As per the Finance Ministry, the government office concerned “shall try to contact” every account holder of the unclaimed deposits through written notice, e-mail or telephone at least two times in 60 days before transferring the amount to the Senior Citizens’ Welfare Fund.
Inoperative accounts Inoperative accounts are those where there has been no contribution by an employee or their employer for 36 months. At present, 9.23 crore out of total 15.84 crore EPF accounts are inoperative with around ₹44,000 crore deposits in them.
“All such inoperative accounts, however, have definite claimants,” Dattatreya had said in reply to a question in Lok Sabha on March 14, 2016.
The government had in March withdrawn a decision by the erstwhile UPA government and had announced that inoperative accounts would start earning interest from April 1 once again. However, the move was never notified.
Tuesday’s CBT meeting failed to discuss hiking the proportion of retirement funds to be invested in Exchange Traded Funds from five per cent at present, which was on the agenda. Sources said that another date for the meeting was not decided.