Who has been appointed as the Chairman of Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) by Government in March 2023 ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), Deepak Mohanty. The Government of India appointed Deepak Mohanty Chairperson of the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority in March 2023, the appointment being notified in the middle of that month, and he took charge later in the same month; he held the office until 2025. He was not a new arrival at the authority, having served as one of its whole-time members before being elevated, and he came to it from the Reserve Bank of India, where he had been an Executive Director. Mamta Shankar was appointed a whole-time member of the authority at the same time. He succeeded Supratim Bandyopadhyay, whose term as chairperson had come to an end earlier in 2023, which is why option (4) names the outgoing rather than the incoming chairman and is the distractor most likely to catch a candidate who followed the story a few months late. The office matters because of what the authority does. The PFRDA is the statutory regulator of India's pension sector, constituted under the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority Act, 2013 and functioning under the Ministry of Finance; it regulates the National Pension System, which covers central government employees who joined service on or after 1 January 2004 as well as State government employees, corporate subscribers and any citizen who chooses to join, and it also administers the Atal Pension Yojana for workers in the unorganised sector. Its chairperson therefore sits alongside the Governor of the Reserve Bank and the chairpersons of the Securities and Exchange Board of India and of the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority as one of the country's principal financial regulators, which is exactly why the appointment is examinable. Option (2) is the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The paper prints this option as 'Amitava Mukharjee'. The spelling is a misprint — the surname is conventionally written Mukherjee — and it has been reproduced here exactly as the Commission printed it, since the stem and the options of a past paper are not the card's to correct. Whoever the option was meant to name, the appointment in question did not go to him: the chairmanship of the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority was conferred on Deepak Mohanty in March 2023. Options of this kind, carrying a common Indian surname and no other identifying detail, are the cheapest form of distractor an examiner can write, because a candidate who is guessing cannot exclude a name he has never encountered. The practical response is to work forward from the fact rather than backward from the options: if you know who was appointed, an unfamiliar name costs you nothing, and if you do not, no amount of scrutiny of the name will help.  (c) This option offers another plain name with no identifying detail attached, and it functions in the same way as option (1) — as an occupant of one of the four slots that a candidate cannot eliminate by reasoning. Nothing connects it to the March 2023 appointment, which went to Deepak Mohanty. It is worth noting the shape of this option set, because it is common in appointment questions: one correct name, one name that is genuinely connected to the office but at the wrong moment in time, and two names that carry no connection at all. The dangerous option is always the second kind, since it rewards partial knowledge with a wrong answer. Options of the third kind are harmless to a prepared candidate and decisive against an unprepared one, which is precisely the discrimination the examiner is after.  (d) Supratim Bandyopadhyay — printed here as 'Bandopadhyay' — is the sharpest distractor in the set, because he is a real chairman of this very authority. He held the office until his term ended in 2023, and Deepak Mohanty was appointed to succeed him. A candidate whose preparation stopped a few months short, or who remembers the name attached to the PFRDA from earlier reading, will choose this option with confidence. The corrective is to record an appointment as a transition rather than as a name: X succeeded Y in month M of year N. Stored that way, the outgoing office-holder becomes an asset rather than a trap, because the question 'who was appointed in March 2023' and the question 'whom did he succeed' are then both answerable from the same line. Appointment questions very frequently offer the predecessor as an option for exactly this reason.

Concept: The Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority is the youngest of India's major financial regulators. It began as an interim body created by a government resolution in 2003, when the shift from a defined-benefit pension for government employees to a defined-contribution system required a regulator, and it acquired statutory standing under the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority Act, 2013, which came into force in February 2014. Its central task is the regulation and development of the National Pension System: it registers and supervises the pension funds that manage subscribers' money, the central recordkeeping agencies that maintain the accounts, the points of presence through which subscribers enrol, and the trustee bank; it prescribes investment norms and the rules on exit and annuity purchase; and it protects the interests of subscribers. The National Pension System applies to central government employees recruited on or after 1 January 2004, apart from the armed forces, and has been adopted by most States; since 2009 it has been open to any citizen. The Atal Pension Yojana, launched in 2015, extends a guaranteed minimum pension to workers in the unorganised sector and is administered by the same authority. Together these make the PFRDA the regulator of the retirement savings of a very large part of the organised and unorganised workforce.

State PCS 2023 Q96 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q96 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer