Your PPF, Senior Citizens Savings Scheme, other small savings schemes will be frozen if you fail to submit Aadhaar details by this date

Sep 1, 2023

Synopsis
If the Aadhaar number is not provided by this date, your small savings investments will be frozen until the Aadhaar number is submitted.

Investors of small savings schemes such as Senior Citizens Savings Scheme (SCSS), Public Provident Fund (PPF), National Savings Certificate (NSC), or other post office schemes must ensure that they have submitted their Aadhaar number to the post office or their bank branch by September 30, 2023. If the Aadhaar number is not provided by this date, your small savings investments will be frozen until the Aadhaar number is submitted.

The Ministry of Finance has made Aadhaar and PAN mandatory for PPF, NSC, and other small savings plans. This was notified with a notification dated March 31, 2023. The notice also made Aadhaar numbers mandatory for existing investors.

Aadhaar

As per the notification, “If a depositor has already opened an account and has not submitted his Aadhaar number to the Accounts Office, he shall do so within a period of six months with effect from the 1st day of April 2023.” The six-month period will end on September 30, 2023

The following are some of the expected results if post office investments are frozen:

1. Wherever interest is due, it will not be credited to the investor's bank account.
2. Individuals may be unable to make deposits into their PPF or Sukanya Samriddhi accounts.
3. The investor's bank account will not be credited with the maturity amount.

If the depositor fails to provide the Aadhaar number within the allotted six-month period, his account will become inactive until the depositor provides the Aadhaar number to the Accounts Office;

PAN submission

With the exception that the person who did not provide the permanent Account Number at the time of account opening must do so to the Accounts Office within two months of the earliest of the aforementioned events, namely;-

1. the balance at any point of time in the account exceeds fifty thousand rupees; or
2. the aggregate of all credits in the account in any financial year exceeds one lakh rupees; or
3. the aggregate of all withdrawals and transfers in a month from the account exceeds ten thousand rupees.

[The Economic Times]