Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) is in the process of implementing another round of reforms known as EPFO 3.0, which will make its services easier, quicker, and more convenient to millions of employees in India.
Among the largest features of this upgrade are the features of members being able to withdraw their provident fund money via UPI thus eliminating long queues and paper work. As an EPFO 3.0 activity, the organisation will roll out an entirely transformed portal. The new site will be user friendly and backed up by improved back end software.
To assist users not only in their own country, but also in other geographical areas, EPFO will implement linguistic translation capabilities with the help of a translation engine Bhasini which is an AI-driven translational tool created by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. This will enable members to get information in regional languages and hence the system will be inclusive.
The shift towards the centralised system is one more significant alteration, like core banking services that are applicable to banks. When this is in place, EPFO members will access their accounts and solve challenges in any of the EPFO offices within the country irrespective of the location of their accounts. This will come in handy exclusively to employees who have a regular movement in and out of cities due to work.
The new Social Security Code will also see EPFO preparing to be covered more widely. In the future, it will be able to coordinate the finances of the unorganised sector workers on its own, whereas gig and platform workers will possess their own social security system. The new regulations will make the EPFO coverage to all establishments employing 20 or above employees irrespective of the sector, compulsory.
The most discussed reform is the EPF withdrawals are UPI-based and are set to start around April. EPFO has almost eight crore members who are active and has a corpus amounting to approximately [?]28 lakh crore.
Under the new system, the members can withdraw a portion of their EPF balance in real-time with the help of UPI using application such as BHIM. The fund will be locked, with a portion of it being able to be displayed by the users as the withdrawable part.
Currently, members are required to make claims of withdrawal and wait before it is approved and it might take a long time. Funds to fulfill such needs as illness, education, marriage, or housing could be credited according to EPFO 3.0 within three days and this considerably decreased delays. This transformation will also lessen the workload of EPFO which processes more than five crores claims annually.
To begin with, the government is planning the withdrawal limit of [?]25,000 per transaction so as to curb the abuse. The amount of time that a withdrawal is allowed to be made in a year will also be limited. Although one may not have reached the total amount limit, frequent withdrawals may be reached to the maximum number of transactions.
To finance these upgrades, EPFO is preparing to award a tender with which to contract an agency to construct, run and maintain the new IT platform to cater the social security schemes. Other companies that were shortlisted in the past following an Expression of Interest process included Wipro, Infosys, and TCS.
These reforms are based on the previous reforms made by EPFO. The number of categories of withdrawal was narrowed down to three general categories, unemployment withdrawal regulations were loosened, and the members were allowed to update personal information on the internet without approval from the employer. More than 32 lakh profile corrections have already done by December 2025.
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Using EPFO 3.0, the organisation wants to make services of the provident fund quicker, more open, and convenient, which will provide real support to the employees relying on their savings in crucial moments of their life.
