New Delhi: In its manifesto for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections released Friday, the Congress has made no mention of the old pension scheme (OPS), signaling a re-think in the party about the electoral effectiveness of the move.
At the Congress Working Committee meeting last month, in which the draft manifesto was discussed, many leaders, including Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, had demanded the inclusion of the OPS.
Chidambaram — the finance minister in Dr Manmohan Singh’s government — had lauded the New Pension Scheme (NPS) that had been rolled out by the Vajpayee government in 2004.
After releasing the manifesto Friday, Chidambaram said, “it is not missing as such. It is very much on our minds.”
He said that the government has appointed a committee headed by the finance secretary to review NPS and the demand for OPS, and to “find a way in which the objectives of OPS can be financed by a funded pension scheme”.
“This means that the government has come around to the point of view that while OPS delivered benefits to the pensioners, NPS made it sustainable,” he added.
Unless the report of the committee is received and then reviewed, “It will be premature to take a stand on the OPS-NPS controversy,” said Chidambaram.
ThePrint had earlier reported that OPS was considered for the manifesto only after several leaders including Priyanka insisted on the scheme. It was not a part of the draft manifesto introduced in the Congress Working Committee last month.
A leader had said at the time, “The OPS had come up for discussion in the meetings of the Manifesto Committee, but it was not put in the draft manifesto prepared by the Committee. Mr. Chidambaram, for one, is really wary of it.”
The Congress had first promised OPS in the Himachal Pradesh assembly election in 2022 and it was cited as one of the factors that had contributed to its victory. The Congress made this promise in the 2023 Karnataka and Telangana assembly election while its governments in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan implemented the OPS. The party, however, ended up losing in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan.
Even though the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government introduced the NPS in 2004, Congress heavyweights Manmohan Singh and P. Chidambaram had previously lauded the new scheme. Now, Congress leaders believe that opposing NPS will attack the party’s own legacy without yielding many returns.
Within the party there are sections that do not favour the implementation of the OPS.
Last year in December, Praveen Chakravarty, head of the party’s data analytics department, had told ThePrint, “There was never any evidence that the Old Pension Scheme is this big game changer in the elections… The OPS is unjust and not fair because it taxes a vast majority to pay for a small minority of privileged people.”
Chakravarty is also a part of the 16-member manifesto committee.
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
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