Over the years of my professional life in the private organisations in India, I have come across multiple financial instruments for retirement planning. Most popular among those are Employee Provident Fund (EPF), Public Provident Fund (PPF) and National Pension System (NPS). If used wisely, these instruments bring significant tax benefits and create huge retirement corpus over the years. While most people are generally aware of the process and benefits of the EPF and PPF, I have found NPS as the most under-rated one and least known among the three. Thus, I will focus on how to effectively use the latter in this article. NPS gets covered under Section 80CCD which itself is a part of the Section 80C of the Income Tax Act 1961. Section 80CCD has three sub-sections: Section 80CCD(1) : The maximum limit is capped at INR 1.5 lakhs per annum . I personally do not find this section much useful as this limit is clubbed with EPF (employee contribution) & PPF investments where most individua...