Yogesh Agarwal, the chairman of the Pension Fund Regulatory & Development Authority (PFRDA), has defended the body's move to allow pension fund managers to directly invest subscribers' money in equities.

In an interview, Mr. Agarwal said that while pension fund managers had been allowed to invest money in equities, it was still be the choice of the subscriber on whether he/she wanted to invest in equities or not.

When asked in the PFRDA was putting investors' money at risk by allowing pension fund managers to invest in equities, Mr. Agarwal said, "The subscriber has a choice on whether to invest in equities. Unless you take some risk, the returns will not be there. If you want to be a safe investor, you have the choice of investing everything in government debt."

He explained that while investment in equities included some risk, it also provides better returns as compared with government debt.

He added that Finance Minister P Chidambaram had assured that there was no issue with the PFRDA Bill and it would be passed in this session.

At present, the New Pension Scheme (NPS) corpus is managed by pension fund managers promoted by the likes of LIC, SBI, UTI, ICICI Bank, Reliance Capital and Kotak Mahindra.

Launched in 2004, NPS' corpus was at around Rs 28,000 crore at the end February this year. The figure represents a year-on-year growth of 77 per cent.