Savers think of the Public Provident Fund (PPF) as the old reliable workhorse of tax-saving, but this is a delusion that is losing them vast sums of money . The other major alternative for tax-saving investments, ELSS mutual funds, provide far higher returns.Consider this example. The maximum allowable investment under Section 80C is Rs 1.5 lakh. The Rs 22.5 lakh you invested would have grown to Rs 51.8 lakh.What would have happened had we made the same investment in an ELSS tax-saving fund instead? Assuming we got just the average returns generated by ELSS fund over these years, the Rs 22.5 lakh would have grown to Rs 1.14 crore.

Source: Economic Times September 19, 2016 05:37 UTC