Atal Pension Yojana

Atal Pension Yojana was launched by the Government of India in May 2015 and administered by the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) with the explicit objective of providing social security to workers in India's vast unorganised sector — daily labourers, domestic help, small farmers, street vendors, and others who had no access to formal pension schemes like EPF or NPS. By March 2024, APY had accumulated over 6 crore subscribers, making it one of India's largest social security initiatives.

The defining feature of APY was its defined-benefit structure: unlike NPS whose corpus-linked pension varied with market returns, APY guaranteed a fixed monthly pension of Rs 1,000, Rs 2,000, Rs 3,000, Rs 4,000, or Rs 5,000 per month after the subscriber reached age 60. The contribution amount required to achieve each pension tier varied by the subscriber's age at entry — younger subscribers paid lower contributions because their money had more years to accumulate. A 25-year-old choosing Rs 5,000 monthly pension contributed Rs 376 per month, while a 39-year-old choosing the same benefit contributed Rs 1,454 per month.

Subscription to APY required a savings account in any bank or post office. Contributions were auto-debited from the linked account on a monthly, quarterly, or half-yearly basis, reducing the friction of remembering payments. The government contributed 50 percent of the subscriber's annual contribution or Rs 1,000 per year — whichever was lower — for subscribers who were not members of any statutory social security scheme and who were not income tax payers. This government co-contribution was available for the first five years of the scheme (2015–16 to 2019–20) for subscribers who joined before December 2015.

Upon the subscriber's death after age 60, the spouse was entitled to receive the same pension for their lifetime. On the death of both subscriber and spouse, the nominee received the accumulated corpus as a lump sum. If the subscriber died before age 60, the spouse had the option to continue the contributions until the original subscriber would have turned 60 and receive the original pension, or exit the scheme and receive the accumulated corpus.

One eligibility change introduced in 2022 was significant: from October 1, 2022, income taxpayers were no longer eligible to enrol in APY, limiting the scheme strictly to those outside the income tax net, consistent with its original purpose of targeting economically weaker sections. Existing subscribers who had enrolled before this rule were not affected.