PENSION, BANKING REFORMS BILLS SOON

The Centre is contemplating to push forward the much needed reforms in the sensitive pension as well as banking sector by introducing the necessary legislations in the forthcoming Monsoon session of Parliament.

“Bills on appointing the regulatory authority to oversee management of pension funds and banking regulation like raising the voting rights of foreign banks in private sector banks are already pending in Parliament. We should be able to take them up in the forthcoming Monsoon Session,” Minister of State for Finance Pawan Kumar Bansal said here on Friday.

Further fine-tuning
The finance ministry is working on further fine-tuning of these pro-reform Bills, he indicated.

The Pension Fund Regulatory & Development Authority (PFRDA) Bill was introduced by the government in Parliament in 2005, to allow new pension fund managers - both public sector as well as private — to manage pensions contributed by the both state-owned and private enterprises. But due to persistent objections from the Left Parties the government could not push through the PFRDA Bill. Left Parties are totally opposed to private sector entry in the sensitive pension sector.The government had even promulgated an ordinance for appointing a Pension Funds Regulatory and Development Authority to oversee the pension sector. Currently the three state-owned entities—subsidiaries of SBI, LIC and UTI Asset Management Company—are managing the pension funds collected from the government employees.

Pension beneficiaries
The intended reform in pension sector seeks to allow private firms to handle this fund and invest the corpus in equity market to fetch better returns for the pension beneficiaries. As part of exercise to push through reforms in the banking sector the minister also indicated that the government would introduce the Banking Regulation (Amendment) Bill in the coming Monsoon session.The Bill proposes to allow foreign investors to have voting rights in banks in proportion with their equity holding, rather than being capped at 10 percent now. Though the Bill was vetted by the Parliamentary Standing Committee of Finance the government could not push through the Bill in the last Budget session in the face of strong opposition from the Left Parties.

Source: The Economic Times, Deccan Chronicle