Mumbai The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has warned all states against trying to re-implement the Old Pension Scheme (OPS). RBI has asked the states not to think about re-implementing OPS. RBI has warned that if OPS is implemented again, the expenditure of the states will increase manifold and it will be beyond their tolerance. Let us tell you that the opposition parties including Congress have made the re-implementation of OPS an election issue. In the states where Congress won the assembly elections, it had promised to implement OPS once again. Even for the Lok Sabha elections, Congress and the alliance of opposition parties are maintaining the issue of implementation of OPS.
RBI has expressed concern over the promises of implementing OPS in place of New Pension Scheme (NPS), saying that the financial condition of the states which do so will worsen. The burden on the government treasury will be so much that it will become unbearable. The opposition governments of Punjab, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh had restored OPS. The Congress government has promised this in Himachal also. At the same time, Karnataka government is also thinking of bringing OPS. According to RBI, if all the states implement OPS again, then the expenditure pressure on them will increase by 4.5 times. This will have a bad impact on GDP. By implementing OPS, the burden of additional expenditure on GDP is likely to reach 0.9 percent by the year 2060. According to RBI, if OPS is implemented again, the benefits of previous economic reforms will be lost and future generations will also suffer losses.
The last of the government employees who are under OPS till now will retire in the early 2040s. These people have to collect pension till 2060. In the year 2004, during the tenure of Atal Bihari government, NPS was implemented in place of OPS. Government employees have been opposing this for some time. Recently, employees had also held a big rally at Ramlila Maidan in Delhi demanding implementation of OPS.