Financial inclusion strategies increasingly rely on women as last-mile agents of delivery. Critically evaluate this approach with examples from Indian pension and insurance sectors.

At NPS Diwas 2025, the Finance Minister launched the "Pension Sakhi" initiative to make women pension ambassadors [1], extending LIC's Bima Sakhi Yojana logic from insurance to pensions [2]. The approach is promising, but its success depends on design quality rather than nomenclature.

Merits of the women-as-agents model

• Trust and access: women community workers already form the last mile of welfare delivery — PFRDA's outreach framework incentivises ASHAs, Anganwadi workers and Bank Sakhis for NPS awareness [1], avoiding fresh bureaucracy.
• Deepening coverage: with over 9 crore subscribers and ₹15.5 lakh crore AUM [1], NPS growth must now come from rural and informal India; Atal Pension Yojana, where women form 48% of enrolments [3], shows this segment is reachable.
• Dual dividend of empowerment: Bima Sakhi targets income opportunities for 2 lakh women, with a stipend plus commission [2] — inclusion of the saver and livelihood for the agent.
• Handling complexity: products like NPS Vatsalya [4] and the Multiple Schemes Framework need explanation, not just a digital interface.

Critical limitations

• Enrolment–activation gap: within a month of Bima Sakhi's launch, of roughly 52,500 registrations only about 14,500 had begun selling policies [5], exposing attrition risks.
• Precarious work: commission-linked, unprotected engagement risks mis-selling and adds burden to already overworked frontline women.
• Persistency problem: pensions require decades of sustained contributions; volatile informal incomes mean enrolment targets may not translate into adequate retirement corpus.
• Design pending: Pension Sakhi awaits PFRDA operational guidelines, while complementary channels — MoUs with NABARD for farmers and Zomato for gig workers [1] — remain equally vital.

The model is therefore a genuine advance, provided agents are treated as a trained, fairly-remunerated cadre rather than a cheap sales channel. Assured stipends, certification, grievance redress and persistency-linked incentives can convert outreach into lasting coverage — making pension access, as the Finance Minister urged, a Jan Andolan consistent with dignity in old age under Viksit Bharat 2047 [1].