The Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation has invested Rs 27,105 crore in exchange traded funds between April and October this fiscal, which is about 51% of its investments in the instrument in the whole of last fiscal.
In all, the EPFO has invested Rs 2.55 lakh crore in ETFs between 2016-17 and October 31, 2023. It had invested Rs 14,983 crore in ETFs in 2016-17, Rs 24,790 crore in 2017-18, Rs 27,974 in 2018-19, Rs 31,501 crore in 2019-20, Rs 32,071 in 2020-21 and Rs 53,081 in 2022-23.
The information was provided by Minister of State for Labour and Employment Rameshwar Teli in a written reply in the Lok Sabha on Monday.
The total corpus of various funds managed by EPFO as on March 31, 2022 was Rs 18.30 lakh crore, of which 91.3% was invested in debt including the Public Account of India and 8.7% was invested in ETFs, the minister further said.
“EPFO does not invest directly in individual stocks including stocks of any blue chip company. EPFO invests in equity markets through ETFs replicating BSE-SENSEX and NIFTY-50 indices,” he said, adding that EPFO has also invested from time-to-time in ETFs constructed specifically for disinvestment of shareholding of the Government of India in body corporates.
The EPFO began investing in equities through the ETFs based on the NIFTY-50 and BSE Sensex in August 2015 with a 5% exposure. Under its current investment guidelines, the EPFO can invest between 5% to 15% of its proceeds in equities and related investments but is currently kept at about 10%. It has been thinking of increasing the investment to 15% in order to improve its returns.
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