Where should I invest my retirement corpus?

I'm a retired government employee and want to invest towards my retirement corpus. This will be a long-term investment as I won't require this money for the next 10-15 years. Over this period, my pension will sufficiently cover my expenses. Kindly suggest the way forward.
- Manohar

Since this will be your long-term investment and you won't require any income from it for a considerable amount of time, you have more freedom to decide your allocation. As you want to build a sizeable corpus, a 50:50 debt to equity allocation may be good enough.

Within the fixed-income allocation, set aside up to the maximum permissible limit of Rs 15 lakh in SCSS (Senior Citizen Saving Scheme). While this will provide you with regular income, but as you don't require it now, you can consider re-investing it somewhere else. You can invest up to Rs. 4.5 lakh individually or Rs. 9 lakh jointly in the Post Office Monthly Income Scheme (POMIS). Since these are government-sponsored schemes, the safety factor is high and thus, the chance of incurring any loss is minimum. Further, these can provide you with adequate returns.

If you are still left with a surplus for your fixed-income exposure, consider investing in short-duration funds.

As for the rest of your money, you can invest it in a couple of good multi-cap funds. Since this money is your hard-earned savings, it is important to protect it. So, make sure that you spread your investments over a period of at least two years so as to reduce the chance of it catching a market high. While this may result in losses and prevent you from investing the amount at a time when the market is at a high following the principle of conservatism, it is important to do so.

Consider doing periodic rebalancing of your portfolio. So, if your 50 per cent fixed-income has reduced to 45 per cent, move the money from equity to debt so as to restore your original asset allocation. Such annual rebalancing will help optimise your return.