Government appoints BJP's Balasubrahmanyam Kamarsu on EPFO board

NEW DELHI: The government has appointed the national coconvenor of Bharatiya Janta Party’s (BJP) legal cell and the secretary of the BJP parliamentary party Balasubrahmanyam Kamarsu on the board of the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) as an industry representative.

The appointment of Kamarsu, a Supreme Court advocate, is being considered unusual as he has not been nominated by any industry body or the Employers' Federation of India (EFI) whose seat has been allocated to him, following the demise of one of its representatives on the EPFO board, Ram Tarneja, in August this year.

EFI representative on the board RS Maker told ET that the organisation had nominated a new member to the board in late August, but hasn’t heard from the labour ministry since then. “We had nominated one of our past presidents Arvind Doshi for the PF board seat that fell vacant due to Mr Tarneja’s demise,” Maker said.

But a notification issued on October 7 by the labour ministry to reconstitute the EPF board said the government is substituting the entry against Tarneja’s name with Kamarsu as an ‘employers' representative,’ but doesn’t mention which industry body he represents unlike other employer representatives.

The 43-member EPFO board comprises 15 state government representatives, eight central government representatives, and 10 members each representing employee unions and industry bodies like CII, Ficci, Assocham and the Employers’ Federation of India or EFI which had two out of the 10 industry seats on the board.
Former EPFO board member Sharad Patil, who also represented EFI, said that this was an unprecedented move as the federation has always had two seats on the board.

The EPFO is the country’s largest retirement fund overseeing lifetime savings of 8 crore formal sector employees, with a cumulative corpus of close to Rs 8.5 lakh crore. The fund’s operations and regulatory role over 3,000-odd companymanaged PF trusts are overseen by its Central Board of Trustees chaired by the Labour and employment minister Bandaru Dattatreya.

“UPA’s late labour minister Sis Ram Ola had also sought to appoint two of his political aides on the board of the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation, one from the employer’s side and one as a union representative,” said an EPF board member, recalling the only parallel to such an appointment in tripartite labour-related boards.

But Ola had got their names nominated or endorsed by the union and industry body concerned, to make the move seem ‘business as usual’, he explained.

Detailed queries sent to the labour ministry on the rationale for the appointment elicited no response till the time of going to press.