Given their enormous reach, the postal department may well be the next points of presence (PoPs) for the new pension system (NPS) to distribute the schemes on a larger scale as it has drawn lukewarm response after it was thrown open to all citizens.

“We (PFRDA and P&T) are already in discussion... They may join. That’s what we are expecting,” a pension fund regulatory and development authority (PFRDA) official said.

Points of presence are contact and collection points for customers wanting to be part of NPS.

He added that the interim pension regulator PFRDA would like to have P&T (post and telegraph) department as its PoP for the NPS due to their enormous reach. However, the only difficulty is that these centres should have IT facility. “The whole system is designed with IT capability. So, the postal department has to find out as to how many of their branches have those IT facilities,” he added.

The distribution system received a big blow after Life Insurance Corp of India (LIC) ceased to be PoP following a directive from the sectoral regulator Irda. Irda asked insurance companies to set up a subsidiary if they want to be PoPs under the NPS. The interim pension regulator is also believed to be unhappy with the functioning of the existing PoPs.

“We are also thinking of meeting all our PoPs because from we have been receiving media reports that PoPs are not well aware or not well-equipped to market our scheme,” the official said.

He added that having registered themselves, the existing PoPs have a moral duty to do the marketing themselves. “Unless their own employees are aware, they will not be able to possibly tell the customers,” he said.

PFRDA rolled out pension plan for all citizens on May 1. Presently, it has 21 PoPs, which include State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, IDBI Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Axis Bank and Union Bank of India.