Kangra: Little pension, ex-teacher Tilak Raj Sharma selling tea, sweets

Rajiv Mahajan

NURPUR, MARCH 22

Retired employees, especially those who have no other source of income, are bearing the brunt of the New Pension Scheme (NPS), enforced in 2004 by the then Virbhadra government.

Tilak Raj Sharma (65) of Dobh village of Shahpur in Kangra district has been running a tea stall to support his family after his retirement as JBT teacher from a Government Primary School over eight years ago.

Sharma had been appointed as a contractual JBT teacher in September 1997 and his services were regularised in 2006. After his retirement from the school on January 31, 2014, he started drawing a monthly pension of Rs 1,618 against the money deposited with the NSDL. To earn his livelihood, he started a makeshift tea-cum-sweet stall and sells the same at local fairs and festivals.

He told The Tribune that the NPS had spoiled his post retirement life. Had he been entitled to the Old Pension Scheme (OPS), he would be drawing Rs 25,000 pension. The NPS had become a curse for employees post retirement, Sharma rued.

Rajinder Manhas, Kangra district president of the NPS Employees Association, said seeing a former MLA selling bangles at a fair, the late Chief Minister Yashwant Singh Parmar had started pension for former MLAs, which had reached over Rs 90,000 today.

“Pension of most of the NPS employees is even less that the old-age pension being disbursed by the government under the social security system,” Manhas claimed.