Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), a retirement fund body, in its latest data has showed that as many as 4,126,138 jobs created from September 2017 to May 2018 for its social security schemes to provide benefits, including provident fund, insurance and pension. Though, the retirement body lowered earlier estimate of new members enrolment by 9.57%, from 4,126,138 to to 3,731,251 for September 2017-April this year. As per data, the new members enrolment in May is the highest so far in last eight month at 7,43,608. During May, the maximum number of enrolment of 2,51,526 were recorded in the age bracket of 18 to 21 years followed by 1,90,090 in 22 to 25 years age group.
It highlighted that the data is provisional as updation of employees records is a continuous process and gets updated in subsequent months. Moreover, it mentioned that the estimates may include temporary employees, whose contributions may not be continuous for the entire year. Besides, it added that for each age-wise band, the estimates are net of the members enrolled and ceased during the month as per the EPFO records.
The EPFO manages social security funds of workers in the organised/semi-organised sector. It runs three social security scheme Employees’ Provident Fund Scheme 1952, Employees’ Deposit Linked Scheme 1976 (EDLI) and Employees’ Pension Scheme 1995. It manages the accounts of over 6 crore members and a corpus of over Rs 10 trillion. Earlier this year, the EPFO had started the practice of updating payroll data on its official portal. The body had also lowered its payroll data estimates earlier.