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The Karnataka government has decided to reconstitute the committee formed to study the implementation of the Old Pension Scheme (OPS) for government employees who entered service after 2006. Earlier this year, a single-member committee was formed under an additional chief secretary to look into the implementation of the OPS for employees currently covered under the New Pension Scheme (NPS).
The new committee will have three to five members, according to Revenue Minister Krishna Byre Gowda. “The reconstitution will happen in the next 10 days and we will fix a time frame for the committee to submit its report,” Gowda told the Legislative Council Thursday.
He was responding on behalf of Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to a question by MLC Marithibbe Gowda regarding the slow pace of the committee in submitting its findings to the government. Krishna Byre Gowda said three rounds of meetings were held with the officials concerned about the issue.
There was a technical problem in implementing the same, he said, citing the example of Rajasthan where an order was passed to revert the OPS. “States are already depositing their money under NPS and it is locked with the central provident fund. It needs to be returned to the respective states,” he said.
The Union government has not responded regarding returning the money to the states. “This means that if there is a hurried implementation, then half the money which is deposited will come under NPS and the rest will have to be given under OPS. This is a complicated issue,” he told the Legislative Council Thursday.
The one-member committee was formed during the fag end of the erstwhile BJP government in Karnataka, following protests from state government employees. Ahead of the elections in May, the Congress, in its manifesto, had offered to “sympathetically consider the extension of the Old Pension Scheme” to government employees who joined the service from 2006 onwards.
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