The late inclusion of Reliance Capital as one of the fund managers to the Employees Provident Fund has the opposition up in arms against the UPA government.

The EPF trustees board had shortlisted HSBC, ICICI Prudential and SBI-based on the tendering process. (See: Reliance capital, SBI, HSBC and ICICI to manage employees provident fund) 

When labour and employment minister Oscar Fernandes first put the proposal to the board of the shortlisted companies to manage the EP Fund, Reliance Capital's name did not figure in the agenda of the meeting.

 This has come inspite of the workers ''representatives'' on the board had opposed it vehemently.

State Bank of India who all these years had been handling the EP Fund of 2,40,000 crore rupees in the corpus fund and another 30,000 crore rupees of the annual incremental fund will now have to share this with HSBC, ICICI Prudential and Reliance Capital.

The main opposition parties the BJP and CPM have criticised the government accusing it of favouring Anil Ambani's Reliance Capital being a close friend of Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh who had bailed the government in the trust vote.

According to BJP party spokesperson Prakash Javadekar the inclusion of Reliance was the prize given to private firms for the kind of politics the nation had witnessed in the past 15 days. He pointed out that hundreds of thousands of people in the United States had lost their money to private fund managers.

The most vociferous opponenet of the opening up of pensions to the private sector, the CPM said this decision was ''anti worker'' and the fund managers will be able to reap profits for themselves by speculating in the stock exchange whereas the employees are not even guaranteed a minimum return on their money.

They also went on to add that this decision by the government was taken in the most undemocratic way and would be opposed very strongly by them when it came up in parliament.

Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi retorted that the proposal to get in new fund managers was long overdue and had been pending since December 2004. ''The party favours maximum returns for those who have money in the EPF. Now, there would be greater flexibility in managing the funds for higher returns.''