E-Paper
The Case for Starting Financial Conversations Early
The NPS Vatsalya Scheme aims to cultivate early money management skills among minors, fostering long-term financial habits for a secure future.
When you ask mothers what their role entails, the answers are likely to vary widely across responsibilities, routines, and expectations. Dig a little deeper, however, and a common thread begins to emerge: preparing children for independence.
Families spend years helping children build emotional resilience, social confidence, and academic capability, all with the hope that one day, they will grow into adults who can navigate the world on their own terms. Yet one of the most important life skills remains strangely absent from many early conversations: how to manage money.
India’s Financial Literacy Gap
In many Indian households, money management remains one of the least discussed life skills. Conversations around earning are common. Conversations around saving, investing, compounding, or long-term financial planning are far less visible, especially during childhood. In many cases, individuals begin learning about money only after they begin earning it, when financial decisions become immediate, and are often shaped by trial and error.
This gap becomes particularly significant as India’s investment culture expands rapidly. According to the National Institute of Securities Markets, the number of demat accounts in India has crossed 15 crore, nearly doubling in the last four years and placing the country among the world’s most retail-active investment markets. Participation has grown significantly through mutual funds, SIPs, fintech platforms, and easier market access.
But participation and understanding haven't grown at the same pace. The World Economic Forum notes that only 27% of Indian adults are considered financially literate, significantly below the average 52% across advanced economies. Taken together, this tells us that more Indians are investing today than ever before, but structured financial understanding still remains uneven.
This puts us at a significant disadvantage because financial behaviour, like any other habit, is built gradually. Learning to save consistently, understanding delayed gratification, recognising the value of long-term investing, or simply becoming comfortable discussing money aren't skills that develop overnight. They strengthen through familiarity and repetition.
The Value of Starting Early
Time also plays a central role. One of the most common reflections among long-term investors is that they regret not starting earlier. Compounding rewards duration as much as contribution. Even small investments made consistently over long periods can grow significantly over time, creating meaningful financial foundations. This extends both financial flexibility and long-term security.
Starting early extends that runway. More importantly, it normalises the idea that financial planning isn't something you need to do only once you're old enough or once you earn enough, but rather, something you do all your life.
It is this mindset shift that initiatives like the NPS Vatsalya Scheme are attempting to encourage. Introduced by the Government of India and regulated by the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA), NPS Vatsalya is designed as a long-term financial security initiative for minors, allowing parents and guardians, and even the children to begin investing for themselves from an early age, extending the investment horizon while encouraging structured saving habits over time.
The scheme is designed to remain accessible. Accounts can be opened for minors by parents or guardians with a minimum contribution of ₹250 and no upper contribution limit. Contributions can also be made by relatives and friends, extending the idea of long-term financial support beyond immediate caregivers. On reaching adulthood, subscribers can choose to continue within the NPS Vatsalya till 21 or transition into a standard NPS account structure or take an exit with accumulated savings. On maturity of NPS Vatsalya or NPS, the lump sum withdrawal and the corpus utilised for purchase of annuity are eligible for tax exemption, subject to applicable provisions.
The minimum investment amount is just ₹10, which is low enough that a child can contribute to it with their own pocket money. Or choose to receive birthday contributions there using the QR code of their NPS Vatsalya account. It also creates opportunities for earlier conversations around how investment, compounding, and delayed gratification works, especially when you consider inflation over the long term. When exposed to these ideas at an early age, they become part of the child's financial blueprint, subtly guiding financial decisions for life.
A Different Approach to Financial Awareness
On the occasion of Mother’s Day 2026, PFRDA, in collaboration with Hindustan Times, brought this idea into a more personal and accessible space through a large-scale engagement campaign conducted across the HT PACE school network in Delhi NCR. The campaign reached over one lakh students across 200 schools through specially designed Mother’s Day greeting cards that encouraged children to create personalised messages for their mothers. The greeting cards also introduced families to the NPS Vatsalya initiative through integrated messaging about the NPS Vatsalya scheme, along with a QR code that led to additional information.
The campaign extended digitally through a dedicated microsite hosted on hindustantimes.com, where students could upload selfies with their mothers, write personalised notes, and generate customised greeting cards. The initiative received 8,889 submissions, including over 6,500 selfie entries and more than 2,300 personalised greeting messages. Selected entries will also be featured in the Hindustan Times Student Edition newspaper.
What made the campaign notable wasn't just the scale of participation, but the way it approached financial awareness indirectly. Rather than positioning the conversation around technical financial products or investment jargon, it anchored the subject within a familiar emotional context: care, responsibility, and long-term support. In doing so, it created an organic bridge between parents, children, and conversations around future planning.
Building Financial Behaviour Over Time
More importantly, the campaign created an earlier behavioural entry point into financial awareness. Financial literacy is often seen as a specialised subject that one only encounters upon entering the workforce. But habits around money are deeply behavioural. Confidence with financial decision-making, comfort with investing, and the discipline required for long-term planning are often shaped much earlier through exposure, observation, and conversation.
A child who grows up understanding the basics of saving and compounding may approach adulthood differently from someone encountering these concepts for the first time under financial pressure. Over time, even small acts - contributing regularly, tracking growth, understanding patience and risk - can influence how individuals think about money, stability, and independence.
Today’s minors are tomorrow’s workforce, and nation builders. As India moves towards becoming a developed economy, this young population won't just contribute to economic growth but will also shoulder the increasing responsibility of supporting an ageing population. With rising life expectancy and changing family structures, these adults of the future will need to plan for much greater self-reliance, and a longer lifespan - both of which require strong financial decision-making muscles. Early financial planning, then, may increasingly become an economic necessity.
As India’s investment landscape continues to expand, the larger challenge may no longer be participation alone, but preparedness. The question is not simply whether more people are investing, but whether future generations are developing the confidence and understanding required to navigate financial decisions responsibly. Initiatives that introduce these conversations earlier, and within everyday family contexts, may ultimately play an important role in shaping that shift.
Note to the reader: This article has been produced on behalf of the brand by HT Brand Studio and does not have journalistic/editorial involvement of Hindustan Times.
