The deposits of various National Savings Schemes (NSS) have crossed Rs 1.170 trillions and the number of account holders is now over 6 million, Finance Ministry officials told Business Recorder here on Thursday.
They said that the worst inflation hit low income group people and pensioners are daily thronging the 367 National Saving Centres in thousands to open their savings accounts for regular monthly income.
They said the Federal Government has increased the rates of return on various National Savings Schemes, specially 2 percent increase in the profit of Bahbood Savings Certificates' w.e.f. Ist July 2008 which has attracted the new depositors in a large numbers.
It may be recalled that the government had launched a number of saving schemes including Defence Saving Certificates (DSC), Special Saving Certificates Registered (SSCR), Bahbood Savings Certificates (BSC), Regular Income Certificates (RIC), Pensioner's Benefit Account and Special Savings Account (SSA) to generate funds to meet the development and non-development expenditure.
Economists and researchers told this scribe that since property and estate business is depressed and the stock market has also crashed in the country, small investors and pensioners consider their life long savings more safe and profitable in the NSS.
However, senior officials of the NSS directorate told Business Recorder that the present 3,500 personnel strength of National Savings centres was not sufficient to meet the workload of maintenance of Rs 1.170 trillion deposits and professionally deal with six million account holders.
They said that the present personnel strength was sanctioned by the government in 1984 when deposits were not more than 20 percent of the present accounts. They regretted that even today the NSS Centres and the directorate were working manually without essential IT networking despite the fact that the government has fixed a target of Rs 150 billion more deposits during the current financial year to meet the budgetary shortfalls.