Chandigarh, Dec. 27 -- The Punjab government is caught in a Catch-22 over restoring the Old Pension Scheme (OPS) for its employees, following the Centre's refusal to refund the accumulated New Pension Scheme (NPS) corpus, and the Unified Pension Scheme (UPS) drawing a tepid response despite multiple extensions of the deadline.

The state government notified the restoration of OPS three years ago, but it has yet to finalise the modalities or issue the standard operating procedures for its implementation for over two lakh employees who joined after 2004, the year Punjab switched to the NPS.

State authorities weighed the option of offering UPS, approved by the Union cabinet for central government employees in August 2024 with enhanced benef...