LIC may enter general insurance

Bajpai, on his first visit to the city after taking over as chairman, said the LIC was planning to start an offshore office in Mauritius to cover South and Central African states. “We are also proposing to start a joint venture in Nepal for life insurance business, details of which were yet to be firmed up. The JV company will start functioning before the end of the current financial year,” he said.

On the performance of the LIC, he said it had already covered 23 per cent of the `insurable’ population in the country, or 11.50 crore policy holders. The chairman said LIC was planning to notch up a total income of Rs 52,796 crore, including premia collection of Rs 34,100 crore during the current year. Till October this year, it had invested Rs 20,000 crore in Central and State Government securities, social sector and corporate sector projects, he added.

Bajpai said the LIC’s contributions to the 8th Five Year and for socially-oriented sectors was around Rs 56,097 crore and in the first three years of the Ninth Plan, it had contributed Rs 79,666 crore. The total contribution during the whole of 9th Plan would be somewhere Rs 1.30 lakh crore, or 10 per cent of the total Plan outlay for the country.

He said during 1999-2000, LIC had settled 66.42 lakh claims for an amount of Rs 9211.30 crore. On an average, LIC settled around 23,000 claims amounting to nearly Rs 32 crore every working day.

A total of 2048 branches had been computerised for their front-end operations so far. Metro Area Networks (MAN) now available in eight cities would be expanded to 33 more cities taking the total to 41 cities. There was also a plan to start a facility to make premia payments through internet in all the 41 cities before the end of this current financial year.