LIFE INSURANCE MARKET: THE RURAL INDIA CONNECT

  • Aditya Kumar Gupta Assistant Professor, School of Management Sciences, Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh)
Keywords: awareness and distribution channels, Rural Life Insurance, product customisation

Abstract

Life insurance is bought lesser in India by rural population. General insurance is often bought because there are
compulsions under the law or from the financiers asking for insurance as collateral security. In the case of life insurance,
there is very little compulsion. The tendency is to defer the decision. The possibility of death is ignored by the rural
people; however there is more possibility of such misfortune for people lives in rural areas. The rural people never believe
that they can succumb to destiny and they think they will live a long and healthy life. The rural population in India
is without life insurance cover and this part of the population is also subject to weak social security and pension systems
with hardly any old age income security. It is an indicator that growth potential for the insurance sector is immense.
Though the Government has taken steps to promote rural insurance, for nearly two decades this field has not made
any head way. One of the priorities for forecasting expansion of rural insurance would be identifying of productive
potential and specific insurance needs in areas not yet reached by insurer and enhancing cooperation between insurance
and rural credit agencies or institutions. The buying behavior of rural consumer is influenced by the income levels
and distributions and marketers efforts on promotional activities. The rural customers are risk avoider therefore
insurance cannot apply the similar methodology that they apply to launch products in urban areas. The paper is an
attempt to examine the current status of rural insurance penetration and to explore the reasons of poor performance
of insurance companies in rural India. It covers the key aspects of tapping emerging insurance market in rural areas,
and focuses remedies to overcome the challenges in this regard. It analyzes the current distribution models and provides
future road map to increase rural share in insurance market. Based on the analysis, the paper tries to give a future
forecast of the market that is intended as a rough guide to the direction in which the market is likely to move.

Published
2020-04-04
How to Cite
Aditya Kumar Gupta. (2020). LIFE INSURANCE MARKET: THE RURAL INDIA CONNECT. Management Insight, 10(1), 81-86. Retrieved from https://journals.smsvaranasi.com/index.php/managementinsight/article/view/444