After the Jan Dhan Yojana, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch three mega social security initiatives - one pension and two insurance schemes - today.
The schemes will be launched in Kolkata, where assembly elections are due next year. More than a dozen Union ministers will also fan out across the country on Saturday for the roll-out of Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana (PMJJBY) and Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana (PMSBY) and Atal Pension Yojana (APY).
There will be simultaneous nation-wide launch of the schemes through functions organised at 112 centres in various States and UTs which would be attended by the respective Chief Ministers or Governors and the Union Ministers, accroding to a finance ministry statement. Senior Union Ministers including the Home Minister Rajnath Singh (Lucknow), Finance Minister Arun Jaitley (Mumbai), External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj (Bhopal), Urban Development Venkaiah Naidu (Varanasi), Food, Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution Minister Ram Vilas Paswan (Patna) and Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari (Bhagalpur) will launch the schemes.
The initiatives are aimed at providing affordable universal access to essential social security protection in a convenient manner linked to auto-debit facility from bank accounts. The schemes are expected to address the issue of very low coverage of life or accident insurance and old age income in the country, it said.
A higher level of APY enrolments from the informal sector will ensure better life chances for such subscribers in their post-retirement phase and resultant decrease in the burden on social security under the National Social Assistance Programme in future, it said.
This will enable the government to improve the quality of infrastructure and also deploy long-term savings mobilised in other needy sectors, as the pension contributions would be invested in the productive sectors of the economy, it added.
“The proposed insurance schemes, PMSBY and PMJJBY will provide much needed access to affordable personal accident and life cover to a vast population, currently not having convenient and systematic access of this nature. It will go a long way in improving insurance awareness and insurance penetration in the country,” it said.
PMSBY will offer a renewable one year accidental death-cum-disability cover of Rs 2 lakh for partial/permanent disability to all savings bank account holders in the age group of 18-70 years for a premium of Rs 12 per annum per subscriber.
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