EPFO enrolment at eight-month high in May

A little over 4.4 million jobs were created from September 2017 to May this year, payroll data of the retirement fund body EPFO has stated.

However, it has lowered the earlier estimate of enrolment of new members by 9.57 per cent, from 4.1 million to 3.7 million for September to April, 2017-18.

According to the payroll data released by the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) last month for September to April, altogether 4.12 million new members were enrolled for its social security schemes to provide benefits, including provident fund, insurance and pension.

According to the latest data released on Friday, the new members’ enrolment in May is the highest so far in the last eight months at 743,608.

In May, the maximum number of enrolment of 251,526 were recorded in the age bracket of 18-21 years, followed by 190,090 million in the 22-25 age group.

The payroll data statement says that the data is provisional as updating of employees’ records is a continuous process and gets updated in subsequent months. It also stated that the estimates may include temporary employees, whose contributions may not be continuous for the entire year.

For each age-wise band, the estimates are net of the members enrolled and ceased during the month according to EPFO records, it added.

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 six crore members and a corpus of over ~1 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.