With the retirement fund body EPFO bruising its hands on debut in stock market, an irony of sorts has emerged in its allocation of funds -- more money was invested in SBI’s Nifty ETF but returns turned poorer.

After years of dilly-dallying on whether to take the risk of investing in stocks, Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) finally invested `2,322.10 crore in ETFs during August-October period, but could earn only a meagre annualised return of 1.52 per cent.

SBI Mutual Fund was mandated to make the investments in its two exchange-traded funds -- Sensex ETF and Nifty ETF.

Officials said that the EPFO invested nearly Rs 590 crore in Sensex ETF, while over `1,730 crore was put in Nifty ETF.

While fund allocated to Nifty ETF was nearly three-times of the same for the Sensex fund, the returns came out almost in the opposite ratio.

The Sensex ETF has earned an annualised return of 2.97 per cent for EPFO -- nearly three-times of 1.03 per cent for the Nifty ETF, officials added.

This has led to the officials and fund managers beginning to have a rethink on their fund-allocation strategies, while the poor returns have also triggered calls from trade unions to altogether stop the stock market investments.

While the Government is still hopeful of better returns over a longer period of time with right allocation of funds, saying three months is a very short time, the union members of EPFO are playing hardball and are asserting that they always warned against the risks associated with the stock market.