East a gold mine for LIC

Eastern zone has maintained its supremacy in Life Insurance Corporation of India's (LIC) business last fiscal "" selling 65.23 lakh policies earning a composite premium of Rs 1808.99 crore for the corporation.

LIC has paid a total claim amount of Rs 19697.20 crore in 2003-04 and per centage claim outstanding (amount) is only 0.88, the lowest in the whole world informed D K Mehrotra, zonal manager, eastern zone.

As on August 15th, 2004 eastern region has already registered a growth of 38.82 per cent in premium earned and 11.22 per cent in numbers of policy sold reaching Rs 410.14 crore and 14.05 lakh policies respectively.

The current year growth target set for the eastern zone is 50 per cent in the number of policies and 40 per cent in terms of premium earned.

Several new products like Bima Plus, Jeevan Anand, Komal Jeevan, Jeevan Shree and few others have contributed significantly totalling to a premium of Rs 116.67 crore till mid august, 2004. LIC who celebrated its 48th anniversary on 1st september is said to enjoy 94 per cent market share in terms of policies and 87 per cent in terms of premium.

LIC's pension plan that targets unorganised sector and rural market has shown a significant decline "" selling only 22,212 policy earning Rs 40 crore as on august 15th, as compared overall figure of 3.26 lakh policy and Rs 468 crore last fiscal, informed Mehrotra.

" The idea of this scheme is yet to catch up with common people's sentiments, specially those in the unorganised sector" said Mehrotra.

" We are planning to launch an unitised pension scheme. We will concentrate on single premium payment plans as they have done extremely good" he added. The growth in single premium plans in eastern zone has been 181 percent in the last fiscal.

Electronic settlement and clearing service that is provided currently in Mumbai and Chennai will be shortly extended to Kolkata, Mehrotra said.

LIC is in talk with Allahabad Bank to use their automated teller machines (ATM) for premium payment of the policy holders - presently they are having tie-ups with UTI and Corporation Bank for the purpose.