GramCover plans to be one-stop shop for rural insurance needs: CEO Bhatt

The company was founded in 2017-18 by a clutch of private equity firms

Rural-focused insurance distribution start-up GramCover has grown its customer base from a few thousand farmers in 2017-18 to over 1.3 million in FY20, with a strong focus on becoming a one-stop solution for all insurance needs.
 
“We follow the simple philosophy of ‘Gaay Se Garhi Tak’ (from cow to car), which is providing insurance products that can cover everything from a cow to a motor car,” Dhyanesh Bhatt, co-founder and Group CEO of Gram-Cover, told Business Standard.
 
Founded in 2017-18 by a clutch of private equity firms, along with Bhatt and Jatin Singh of private weather forecasting firm Skymet, Gram­Cover has scaled up its insurance portfolio quickly and penetrated new areas in a short span of time.
 
It claims to have collected around Rs 53 crore in premi­ums in FY20, against a mere Rs 50 lakh at the time of its inception.
 
Principally in distributing crop insurance to non-loanee farmers (under the Centre’s marquee Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana along with some customised insurance products for specific crop needs), GramCover is increasingly looking to diversify into other areas of insurance by leveraging technology.
 
“For example, in the case of health, our understanding shows that people in rural areas do not prefer the traditional mediclaim kind of policies which give cashless treatment through a network of hospitals because there are no hospital chains there. There­fore, the customers prefer ‘benefit’ policies or hospicash sort of products where there is a fixed payout in the case of an event as it provides some assured relief to the beneficiary if there is wage loss due to hospitalisation. Similarly, in the case of life insurance, small-ticket moneyback products work well in rural areas,” Bhatt said.
 
Over the past three years, the company has onboarded multiple insurance companies on the platform and has also created payment solutions for them.
 
“Our vision is to have 10-12 products in each vertical, which can then be offered to rural customers through the PoS partners who don’t have the luxury of doorstep insurance infrastructure like their urban counterparts,” Bhatt added.

Dhyanesh Bhatt, co-founder and Group CEO of Gram-Cover

 
Point of Sale (PoS) partners, typically, are rural youths with minimum Class 10 qualification who work on a commission basis to sell insurance products on GramCover.
 
“On an average, a PoS partner earns a variable pay of around 10-12 per cent of the premium collected as commission which also varies with products,” Bhatt explained.
 
So, far around 2,000 PoS partners have associated with the firm, including some graduates and PGs as well.
 
“The PoS partner is just not a sales agent for rural customers but also acts as their guide and first contact point for all their insurance problems,” Bhatt said.
 
Skymet provides weather-related data for insurance products to GramCover.
 
Bhatt said his vision is to make the start-up a preferred partner for both insurance companies and rural customers and becoming synonymous with rural insurance in the years to come.
 
According to industry data, India’s overall insurance penetration is just 3.7 per cent of GDP, which is half the world average, while insurance premium paid per person is 1/10th of the world average.
 
In the case of rural India, it is even lower with less than 5 per cent of livestock having any kind of insurance.