Zomato, Urban Company gig workers embrace NPS, contributing up to ₹5,000 weekly: HDFC Pension’s CEO
HDFC Pension is successfully enrolling gig workers from platforms like Zomato and Urban Company into the National Pension System. By simplifying the onboarding process and using existing KYC frameworks, the company has significantly increased retirement planning participation among informal workers.
Why it matters
This initiative addresses the critical lack of social security and retirement savings for millions of gig workers in India's growing informal economy.
HDFC Pension is seeing encouraging early signs from its push into India’s gig economy, with workers increasingly contributing to their National Pension System (NPS) accounts, according to Sriram Iyer, Managing Director and CEO of HDFC Pension.
In an interaction, he said that the company’s partnerships with Zomato and Urban Company have fundamentally changed how it approaches pension adoption among gig workers.
Unlike salaried employees, gig workers do not have an employer-employee relationship with platforms, making conventional pension enrolment difficult, he said.
“The big aha moment for us was when we went to Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) and said we will need to create a process which is not cumbersome,” Mr. Iyer said, explaining that traditional employer-employee onboarding models were unsuitable for platform workers.
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