Apart from regional school employees and teachers’ pension funds, even the top universities have registered—Massachusetts Institute of Technology in March 2007 and Duke University as recently as on January 8.

Countries such as Malaysia, South Korea, Northern Ireland, Australia and New Zealand have, in fact, started investing their national pension funds as well as civil servants’ pension funds in India. And on May 18, 2007, the Pension fund for members of the European Parliament entered India.

Jayanth R Varma, finance professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, says, “Globally, pension funds constitute the single largest pool of managed money and they tend to be long-term investors as they have to invest for pensions to be paid 15 to 20 years from now, if not longer. So they won’t churn their money every three months and bring depth and resilience to the market.”

Pension funds the world over are fiercely regulated as they deal with the ‘sacred’ funds people work all their lives for—to retire in peace. As for Indian workers who would prefer to move some of their PF money out of 8-per-cent-yielding government bonds to high-yielding stocks, Varma points out that the framework is already there. “All you need to do is open up the new pension scheme for civil servants to everybody. The option of allowing workers to invest 10 per cent in index stocks instead of individual stocks is also good as in the long run, they won’t lose their capital as feared,” he says.