Mubashir Aalam Wani
Srinagar, Dec 9: National Old Pension Restoration United Front (NOPRUF) Thursday demanded restoration of old pension scheme.
NOPRUF while addressing media persons, said that their main purpose of visit to Jammu and Kashmir was to strengthen the organization and to spread mass awareness among all the government employees of Jammu and Kashmir about the merits of Old Pension Scheme (OPS) and demerits of New Pension Scheme (NPS) introduced in J&K in January 2010, which is not at par with Old Pension Scheme (OPS) in terms of post-retirement benefits.
National President BP Rawat and other NOPRUF leaders termed NPS full of demerits and flaws. They said that it is not beneficial for the post-retirement life of an employee, who cannot even meet the expenses of medicines from the meager pension through NPS.
Leaders claimed that the future of employees and their families is not secure under the privatized NPS, which is subjected to a high risk share market. They said that there are many pension cases under the NPS scheme in which it has been witnessed that retirees are getting just an amount of around Rs one thousand as monthly pension in present times while the prices of basic commodities are skyrocketing.
They said that “this campaign for restoration of the Old Pension Scheme will continue and remain sustainable until the government scraps NPS and restores employee friendly Old Pension Scheme(OPS) for the due benefit of employees as well as for the benefit of the nation.”
The government should accept the legitimate demand for restoration of OPS, otherwise NOPRUF would intensify its countrywide agitation to mount the pressure on government for the same, peacefully under the democratic way, they said.
