The 208th meeting of the Central Board of Trustees (EPF) was held in Hyderabad today under the chairmanship of Shri Bandaru Dattatreya, Union Minister for Labour & Employment & Chairman, CBT, EPF.
Major highlights of the meeting are:-
1. In a major decision, the Central Board of Trustees enhanced the Insurance benefits under the Employees Deposit Linked Insurance Scheme(EDLIS) 1976 admissible to dependants of EPF members from the present maximum of Rs 3,60,000 to Rs 6,00,000. This will benefit 4 Crore EPF contributing members. Last year the approximate amount paid to about 30,000 beneficiaries was to the tune of Rs. 180 crores. The Board also recommended removal of the condition of continuous employment of one year under current employer before being eligible for insurance benefits.
2. The Minister already launched EPF Mobile App yesterday for the benefit of EPF members. Through this the EPF members can activate their UAN (almost 5.4 crore UAN numbers issued till date and out of these 1.8 crore are activated) and gain access to their accounts through missed call and SMS also. Further a toll free missed call facility has also been launched. This application is now available for download on www.epfindia.gov.in
3. The CBT also discussed the Cadre restructuring for staff and officers of EPFO where Minister informed that very soon a Special CBT Meeting will be convened to redress career progression issues. Through this 20,000 staff and officers of EPFO will get promotions.
4. The Central Board (EPF) had earlier decided to commence investments in equity through small proportion of incremental accretions of EPFO corpus in the Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). The Board was informed of progress made in this regard.
5. Incentive being proposed for encouraging EPF members to seed their UAN with KYC (Know You Customer) documents.
6. Report of the Committee constituted by Government of India to facilitate housing for EPF subscribers was placed before the Board for information.
7. The Board approved the proposal to engage EdCIL, A Government of India enterprise for handling recruitment work of EPFO.
8. The Board recommended that PF Aapke Dwar programmes should be conducted more regularly and the representatives of trade unions and employer associations should be called to these programmes.
Today’s meeting of the Central Board was attended by all the ten members representing Central Trade Unions (being representatives of the employees), eight members representing employers’ associations out of existing nine members, all members from the Central Government and five state Government representatives.
