Examine the challenges of extending formal old-age income security to India's informal and rural workforce. How can schemes like NPS and its outreach models like 'Pension Sakhi' help?

Over 30.98 crore unorganised workers are registered on the e-Shram portal [2], yet most lack any contributory pension. Extending formal old-age security to them is less a design problem than a delivery and affordability problem.

Challenges in extending coverage

• Scale and informality: the bulk of India's workforce is unorganised — agriculture, construction, trade, transport and personal services — with no employer to co-contribute [2][3].
• Irregular, seasonal incomes make the disciplined monthly contribution that pension products assume difficult to sustain, causing high dropout.
• Last-mile access and literacy gaps: rural households face limited distribution networks and low awareness of long-horizon savings, preferring gold or land.
• Adequacy: the unorganised sector's flagship, Atal Pension Yojana, caps assured pension at ₹5,000 per month, which inflation erodes over a long retirement [4].
• Gendered exclusion: women, concentrated in unpaid and casual work, are hardest to reach despite forming about 48% of APY enrolments [4].

How NPS and 'Pension Sakhi' can help

• A scalable, regulated vehicle: NPS is portable, low-cost and PFRDA-regulated, with over 9 crore subscribers and around ₹15.5 lakh crore AUM, delivering over 9% CAGR in 14 years — returns that can offset inflation risk [1].
• Product diversification: the Multiple Schemes Framework launched on NPS Diwas 2025 allows pension funds to design schemes specifically for women and platform workers [1].
• Trust-based last-mile agents: Pension Sakhis, proposed by the Finance Minister on the model of LIC's Bima Sakhis, would train and incentivise rural women to enrol subscribers, leveraging existing ASHA, Anganwadi and Bank Sakhi networks [1].
• Dual dividend: such cadres create women's livelihoods while deepening coverage; PFRDA's MoU with NABARD to reach farmers through FPOs shows the same institutional-piggyback logic [1].

Old-age security for informal workers will be won at the doorstep, not in product design alone. Pairing NPS's regulated architecture with incentivised women intermediaries, adequate minimum benefits and micro-contribution flexibility can convert pension saving into a genuine Jan Andolan, advancing the dignity that Viksit Bharat 2047 and Article 41's promise of public assistance in old age envisage [1].