When it comes to planning for the future, you can never be too careful. While a provident fund account also allows you to save for the future, the kind of withdrawals you can make are limited. On the maturity of a provident fund, you can only withdraw a small portion of the funds. You must use the rest to purchase annuity.
With a pension plan, you can build up a corpus for the future and use it any way you wish since there is no cap on the amount you can withdraw on maturity.