Samhitha, D. S.2024-11-172024-11-172024-05-15https://dans.nls.ac.in/handle/123456789/2141While social protection is widely acknowledged as crucial, over 4 billion individuals remain without any form of social security. Additionally, the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has made the difference in social protection even more obvious, widening the gap between high- and low-income countries (ILO Report 2022). Any legal social protection plan or program that provides some financial stability to individuals in the event of retirement, survivorship, incapacity, disability, parenthood, or unemployment is known as social security. Multiple studies suggest that people might not be able to save adequate savings for retirement due to insufficient pre-retirement planning. Thus, a methodical and prompt approach to retirement management is necessary for social, psychological, and financial readiness. Also, the Covid-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on the retirement savings of millions of people who have Employee Provident Fund (EPF) accounts. The number of claims for withdrawal from the EPF accounts went up drastically which is of great concern despite knowing the importance of saving for retirement. Though this seems to have been an immediate arrangement to meet the basic needs, this may have implications on the financial security during retirement and in turn affects the social security of the individuals. Therefore, this brings us to a point where it is necessary to analyse and understand the trend in terms of withdrawals from their EPF accounts and also find out what are the reasons for the workers to give priority to immediate needs over the long-term retirement benefit. A similar trend can be witnessed among the Garment sector workers in Karnataka who rely on their EPF savings for unexpected expenses, medical emergencies, education costs for their children and for meeting other immediate needs. This again brings us to the larger question as to why workers give priority to fulfilling their immediate needs over long-term benefits. Therefore, this study aims to find out the reasons for withdrawals by people from EPF accounts neglecting the long-term benefit of saving for their retirement and how this contributes to or relates to the concept of Retirement confidence.Thesis