Summary: The Chairperson of PFRDA stated that achieving a Viksit Bharat by 2047 requires not only economic growth but also a resilient pension ecosystem that ensures financial security for citizens in retirement. The address emphasized that pension funds serve the dual purpose of providing social security and acting as a source of long-term patient capital to support infrastructure, technology, education, healthcare, sustainability, and other developmental priorities. It highlighted that India’s pension assets have already crossed Rs. 35 lakh crore and are expected to expand significantly by 2047. The speech outlined three core principles of the National Pension System (NPS)—transparency, low cost, and flexibility—and described the Atal Pension Yojana as an instrument of financial inclusion for citizens without employer-sponsored pensions. It also highlighted PFRDA’s efforts towards digital onboarding, risk-based supervision, simplified compliance, and wider investment choices, concluding that a developed nation is one where citizens can grow old with financial security.
Keynote Address: Role of Pension Funds in Building the Nation towards a Viksit Bharat 2047
Bombay Chamber’s 190th Annual General Meeting
Speaker: Chairperson, PFRDA
Date: 25th June 2026
The President of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce & Industry, Mr. Rajiv Anand, members of the Managing Committee, fellow regulators and policymakers, distinguished members and invitees, ladies and gentlemen – a very good evening to you all.
It is my honour and privilege to address this august gathering on the historic occasion of the Bombay Chamber’s 190th Annual General Meeting. Over nearly two centuries, this hallowed institution has borne witness to the remarkable journey of Indian industry and enterprise.
Let me begin not with the customary preamble, but with the year that now governs almost every serious conversation about this country’s future: 2047. The centenary of our independence. The year by which we have resolved, as a nation, to stand among the developed economies of the world- a Viksit Bharat. We tend to measure that ambition in the language of output: gross domestic product, manufacturing share, per-capita income, the size of our economy in trillions of dollars. These are necessary measures. But they are not, by themselves, sufficient. A nation does not become developed merely by becoming large. It becomes developed when growth is matched by resilience, when prosperity reaches not only the productive years of a citizen’s life, but the years that follow them.
I want to put a proposition before you this evening- that the question of how India ages may prove to be as decisive for Viksit Bharat as the question of how India grows. And that pensions, long treated as a quiet, technical corner of finance, belong at the very centre of the national project.
The macro view- Pensions as an engine of Viksit Bharat
We celebrate, with good reason, India’s demographic dividend, the fact that we are a young nation, with a vast working-age population, at a moment when much of the world is greying. But the young worker of today is the retiree of 2047 and beyond. The demographic dividend is not a permanent inheritance; it is a window. And the test of a serious nation is what it builds during that window to prepare for the decades after it closes.
This is why I would ask you to think less about the demographic dividend and more about demographic resilience – the capacity of a society to carry its citizens with dignity through the full arc of their lives, including the years when they no longer earn. A country can be prosperous on paper and still fail this test, if its elderly are left dependent, anxious and unprovided for. Conversely, a country that builds deep, trusted, well-governed retirement systems converts the energy of its young workforce today into security for its entire population tomorrow. That conversion, to my understanding, is the real dividend.
A pension system is, at its heart, an instrument of human dignity. It is a promise that the years of contribution will be honoured by years of security. But pension funds are also among the purest sources of what we call patient capital: pools of long-term savings insulated from short-term volatility and return pressures. In an era of hyper-mobile capital flows and whimsical hot money fads, such patient capital offers a vital ballast for the nation-building project. With investment horizons stretching over decades, pension funds can stay the course in building critical infrastructure, seeding innovative technologies and nurturing sunrise industries – the essential building blocks of a developed economy.
Consider the scale of what is at stake. India’s pension funds, including the NPS and the legacy EPFO, are already valued at over Rs.35 lakh crore. By 2047, these assets under management are slated to swell manifold, in tandem with a rapidly expanding workforce and a maturing pension system architecture. Therein lies unprecedented opportunity and ipso facto, a responsibility, to steer this firehose of inter-generational capital towards avenues of maximal developmental impact.
When a nation builds a deep domestic pool of long-term savings, it also gives its capital markets an anchor. Markets with a strong base of domestic institutional capital are simply more stable. They are less hostage to the moods of foreign portfolio flows, less prone to violent swings when global sentiment turns and better able to absorb shocks. A robust pension ecosystem is, in this sense, a quiet pillar of financial sovereignty. It allows India to finance more of its own development out of its own savings and to depend less on capital that can arrive in a wave and depart in a panic. Social security on one side; patient capital and market stability on the other. This is the dual role of pensions.
Three frontiers for pension capital
Let me make this concrete. I would bolster my assertion with three areas where this growing pool of patient capital can be transformational.
1. First, pension funds can play a pivotal role in upgrading India’s infrastructure to world-class standards. Patient capital is ideally suited to finance large-scale, long-gestation projects in renewable energy, transport networks, urban rejuvenation and digital connectivity. By allocating funds to InvITs and REITs, pension funds can crowd in private risk capital while enjoying stable, inflation-indexed returns and asset security. Innovative co-investment platforms can enable pension funds to partner directly with specialised government vehicles. Targeted allocation of of pension corpuses to infrastructure over the next decade can help bridge India’s investment gap and create a truly 21st-century economy.
2. Second, pension funds can step up as catalysts of India’s technology transformation. As the world hurtles into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, breakthrough innovations in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, new materials and clean energy will determine the geopolitical pecking order. Long-term, risk-tolerant pension capital can anchor this high-stakes race by fostering a vibrant start-up and venture capital ecosystem, strengthening India’s science and technology base, seeding translation-stage innovations and patiently renewing cutting-edge intellectual property. In doing so, pension funds can generate superior risk-adjusted returns while cementing India’s techno-economic standing.
3. Third, pension fund capital can flow to critical developmental priorities and social infrastructure – education, healthcare, skills and sustainability. These can generate positive externalities while emerging as resilient, yield-generating asset classes. Pension funds are uniquely positioned to finance industry-academia partnerships, back medical research, seed vocational training and mainstream ESG investments, generating a ‘double bottom line’ of superior returns and sustainable impact.
PFRDA’s role- The architecture of trust
None of this is possible without trust and trust must be built into the architecture. At the centre of our efforts is the National Pension System, which can be thought of not as a product but as a piece of public infrastructure for retirement, built on three principles that we guard carefully.
The first is transparency. A subscriber to the NPS can see, clearly and continuously, what they have contributed, how it has been invested and how it has grown. In a domain where trust is everything, transparency is not a feature; it is the foundation.
The second is low cost. The NPS is among the most cost-efficient retirement vehicles available anywhere. That matters more than it may appear, because over a working life of thirty or forty years, even small differences in cost compound into very large differences in the pension a person eventually receives. By keeping costs low, we ensure that the returns generated by the markets reach the subscriber and are not eroded along the way.
The third is flexibility. The NPS is designed to move with the modern Indian career – portable across employers and across the country, offering choice in how savings are invested and adaptable to the very different circumstances of a salaried professional, a self-employed entrepreneur and a worker in the informal economy.
And if the NPS is the architecture for those in formal and structured employment, then our flagship instrument of financial inclusion is the Atal Pension Yojana. APY exists to answer a simple but profound question: what about the citizen who has no employer to enrol them, no human-resources department to structure a benefit, no pension by default? APY reaches precisely these citizens, offering a guaranteed minimum pension in their later years in exchange for modest, regular contributions during their working life. It embodies a principle that must define Viksit Bharat: that the growth story of 2047 will leave no citizen behind. A developed India cannot be one in which the prosperity is concentrated and the security is selective.
As a regulator, we are working to make all of this easier, safer and better. We have moved decisively towards digital onboarding through e-NPS, so that joining the system is a matter of minutes rather than paperwork – accessible, increasingly, from a phone. We have worked to ease the compliance burden, particularly for the employers and intermediaries who help us reach subscribers, because a regulation that is cumbersome to comply with is a regulation that quietly excludes people. We have been strengthening our supervision so that it is risk-based: focusing our scrutiny where the risks to subscribers are greatest. And we have been widening the investment choices available within the system, so that we can pursue stronger returns while managing risks prudently. The objective of all of this is singular: a system that is easy to enter, safe to remain in and capable of delivering a pension worthy of a lifetime of saving.
Conclusion
Let me close where I began: with the year 2047. By then, the Indian growth story will be written not just by its demographic dividend but by the acumen with which its pension capital is deployed – for in the allocation of that inter-generational capital lies the key to the next frontiers of Indian civilisation. I call upon the far-sighted captains of industry assembled here to join hands with India’s pension fund managers in steering the ship of our economic destiny.
And as we measure that destiny in the years ahead, I would offer one final thought. A nation is not truly developed when its skylines are tall or its growth rates are high, important as those things are. A nation is truly developed when its citizens can grow old without fear. That is the test. And a pension – reliable, well-governed and within reach of every citizen, from the child whose first account is opened today to the farmer and the platform worker we are reaching for the first time – is one of the most concrete ways a society passes it.
The road to a Viksit Bharat is paved with farsighted decisions in the here and now. In the immortal words of Mahatma Gandhi, “The future depends on what you do today.”
Thank you.
