Nearly 90% of India’s workforce—around 500 million people—are part of the informal economy, not eligible for a pension and not covered by social security. After years of earning modest, irregular incomes from physically demanding labor—domestic work, farming, mining, fishing, and selling goods on the street—some informal workers may need to stop working as early as their late forties and early fifties, facing potentially decades more life with no financial safety net and the real risk of living in poverty.
Women are in an especially tough position. Longer lifespans, unpaid care work, and frequent income interruptions leave women acutely exposed to poverty in their older years.
A burden for every generation
Without urgent action, within the next 25 years nearly 350 million older adults in India will be left without financial supports such as a pension, savings, or insurance when they are no longer able to work. For their families, this amounts to a triple burden as working-age earners must simultaneously finance three generations: their children, themselves, and their aging parents. Not only does this divert savings and suppress upward mobility, but could also push entire households into poverty when medical costs rise or other financial shocks hit. Three decades of poverty-reduction gains in India could be reversed.
How can hundreds of millions of domestic workers, street vendors, farmers, and gig workers turn a lifetime of hard work into financial security and halt this generational burden?
Preventing elder poverty through financial resilience
Universal Pensions seeks to help low-income workers prevent old age poverty and build long-term financial resilience through accessible pension savings, insurance, and emergency savings solutions. More than financial inclusion, Universal Pensions is piloting a promising approach to advancing financial resilience, ensuring that informal workers can retire with financial security, dignity, and independence.
Universal Pensions works with governments, pension providers, employers, community organizers, and others to develop inclusive pension models for the underserved. Unlike pension systems that are designed for salaried earners who can afford regular monthly deductions, Universal Pensions’ models dismantle the systemic barriers facing informal workers: irregular incomes, low financial literacy, complex products with cumbersome paperwork, and lack of trust in the formal financial system. This is one example of how partnerships can expand retirement savings for informal workers. Universal Pensions’ models have been piloted in several developing economies, with encouraging early experience.
In India, Universal Pensions connects informal workers to the National Pension System (NPS), helping and incentivizing them to activate accounts and start saving for retirement, many for the first time in their lives. The NPS now covers tens of millions of workers in India—almost all of whom are excluded from formal retirement and other tools supporting financial resilience.
A pension for India’s golf caddies
Around 50,000 men work as caddies at roughly 250 golf courses across India, walking 8 to 10 kilometers a day carrying a 12-kilogram bag, and earning a few hundred rupees (equivalent to a few US dollars) per round plus tips. They are not employees of the golf course—they are self-employed individuals who are not eligible for any pension or social security benefits and often struggle to secure a stable living.
In 2022, Universal Pensions collaborated with the Caddy’s Welfare Trust (CWT) to launch a pilot pension awareness and enrolment program at the Delhi Golf Club. To encourage voluntary participation, the CWT co-contributed ₹5000 ($53) to the NPS account of each caddy who signed up for the scheme. If a caddy saves ₹3,000 ($32) on his own into his NPS account per year, he also receives a matching contribution from the CWT. Their savings also earn market-linked returns through the NPS, allowing their money to grow over time. Today, of the 150 caddies who voluntarily activated their NPS under this pilot, 99% have been regularly saving small sums for their later years. Universal Pensions is now expanding this scheme to cover all golf courses across India.
“Given a trusted institution, a structured nudge, and a manageable contribution, 99% of an informal-sector cohort chose to save for their old age—voluntarily, and persistently.” – Universal Pensions
At 62, Nar has spent 45 years in the workforce and is one of the longest-serving caddies at the Delhi Golf Club. In 2022, he attended a pension awareness program organized by the Caddy Welfare Trust, Universal Pensions, and HDFC Pension. It was there that he first learned about the NPS. Today, he has accumulated approximately $700 in his NPS account and continues to contribute whenever possible.
Although he cannot read statements or navigate complex forms, he uses the pension app to make contributions and track his savings. He regularly attends the pension camps organized by Universal Pensions at the golf club, where he receives support and is able to ask questions and learn more about the scheme. He also often shares his experience with younger caddies, encouraging them to start saving now rather than later. Today, Nar Singh is still saving, proving that the best time to start may have been years ago, but the second-best time is today.
Gift-a-Pension® for domestic workers
Globally, nearly 200 million people are employed as domestic workers, and an estimated 40 million in India alone. Almost all are women and almost none have a pension. Many domestic workers also cannot read or write and face significant barriers in opening pension accounts on their own. A few years ago, Universal Pensions developed and field-tested the Gift-a-Pension initiative, which encourages and enables middle- and high-income households to educate and assist their employees with activating their own pension accounts.
Employers can choose to add a monthly co-contribution to the savings of their employees. This pension account stays with the worker for life, regardless of who they work for next or where they move. This model is designed to work in any country with a national digital ID and payment system and a regulated pension provider.
From a young age, Tulsi has always taken care of other people, working for three different households while her husband took whatever domestic work he could find. Together they earned enough to get by, but the month always ended with nothing left over.
Then, one of the families she worked for began talking to her about something she had never considered: old age. They spoke about dignity, financial security, and saving for a future that felt very far away. They told her about the National Pension System (NPS) and showed her how other workers were saving.
Tulsi’s employer used the Gift-a-Pension platform to help activate her NPS account. She started saving ₹500 (US $5) every month and her employer matched it with another ₹500. For the first time in her life, Tulsi was setting aside money meant entirely for her.
In 2015, Tulsi’s husband died. She was suddenly alone with two young children, no savings, no insurance to cushion the shock, and no family to fall back on. Every rupee mattered. And still, she kept saving in her NPS account as it had become part of who she was.
Although her NPS contributions stopped during the pandemic, a recent phone call from the Universal Pensions helpline encouraged Tulsi to reactivate her NPS account. She wants to start saving again while she still has working years ahead of her, and now understands that a pension is more than retirement money. It is protection against uncertainty. It is about dignity, independence, and peace of mind.
The conditions for a new pension model in India are in place: strong political will for inclusive finance, conducive legal and regulatory frameworks, a national digital ID system, widespread adoption of mobile payments, and millions of young, digitally savvy informal workers with the capacity to save small but regular amounts. What is needed now is the global political will to make elder poverty a development priority and act with the urgency the demographic clock demands.