Retirement planning addresses one of the most significant financial challenges for Indian professionals — ensuring sufficient corpus to fund 25–30 years of post-retirement life in the context of rising life expectancy, healthcare inflation, and the shift away from defined-benefit pensions.
India's retirement savings ecosystem has three main pillars:
Provident Fund (EPF and PPF): the Employee Provident Fund is mandatory for employees in establishments of a certain size, with employer and employee contributions. Public Provident Fund is a government-backed long-term savings scheme available to all citizens. Both offer tax-exempt returns and withdrawal.
National Pension System (NPS): a market-linked, defined-contribution pension scheme regulated by PFRDA. Corporate NPS is offered by many Pune employers, particularly in IT and financial services, and carries a valuable additional ₹50,000 deduction under 80CCD(1B).
Personal investment: mutual funds, direct equity, real estate and insurance savings plans that supplement formal provident funds.
The planning challenge is numerical: how much corpus is needed at retirement, at what savings rate does the client reach it, and how does inflation — especially healthcare inflation, which typically runs higher than general CPI — erode the real value of both the corpus and the income it generates?
Source: PFRDA NPS framework; EPF Act provisions; FPSB India retirement planning curriculum.