What is the better option for my retirement - an ELSS or a large-cap mutual fund investment?

Retirement planning depends on your age, risk appetite, salary, etc. The first step is calculating how much you would require after your retirement. This depends on your current living expenses, and how much of your current expenses will be there even after you retire. Inflate that and you will have your monthly expenses post-retirement. Ideally, you should have enough corpus to last the period of retirement with the retirement corpus generating relatively safer returns and inflation eating away at your expenses.

Once you arrive at the corpus, see how much your existing savings will help meet that corpus. There are a number of retirement savings schemes available like Public Provident Fund (PPF), Employee Provident Fund (EPF), National Pension System (NPS), etc where investors can invest a part of their monthly earnings into a fund during the course of their employment, and withdraw the amount accumulated in the fund on retirement.

Now, coming to your question, it all depends on your personal preference and your goals. Though the risk between the two options is nearly the same, the difference is that ELSS is tax saving while a large-cap MF is not. So, if you have not yet exhausted the tax-saving portion of your overall income, you can definitely checkmark ELSS for the purpose of retirement. However, if that is not the case, then it is better to stick to large-cap MF since you aren’t going to receive any additional benefit from holding an ELSS fund.