At 93 lakh in FY21, every 1 in 3 health insurance policies is sold to a woman in India

Representative image

While health insurance retailing recorded a 28.5 percent surge in sales after the pandemic shock, one in every three policies were sold to a woman, shows a study conducted by the State Bank of India.

Let's take a look at some some major trends in the insurance industry emerged during the pandemic and in the post-COVID India.

• In FY21, the retail health insurance policies showed a massive jump of 28.5 percent to Rs 26,301 crore and continued to grow in FY22. During April-January 2022, health insurance portfolio of insurers increased by 25.9 percent, with rise in retail health policies of 17.3 percent and group policies of 30.1 percent.
• Every  one in three life insurance policies is sold to a woman. The number of policies issued to women in FY21 stood at 93 lakh. The share of women policyholders has grown to 33 percent of the health cover pie from 32.2 percent in 2019-20.
• The proportion of policies on women in case of private life insurers is 27 percent and that of LIC is 35 percent. In 19 states, the share in the number of policies bought by women to the total policies sold is higher than the all-India average of 33 percent.
• The death claims paid by the life insurance industry has increased by 40.8 percent to Rs 41,958 crore in FY21. In case of individual life insurance business during FY21, the life insurers paid 10.84 lakh claims, with a total benefit amount of Rs 26,422 crore - a growth of 46.4 percent.
• The ticket size of the death claims increased to Rs 2.44 lakh in FY21, compared to Rs 2.13 lakh in FY20. The rise in death claims seems due to the increased deaths during COVID-19.
• The share of policies sold through online and web aggregators stands at just 1.9 percent in terms of premium value and around 1.6 percent in terms of number of policies. The growing channel is bancassurance, in which the share in premium collections has increased to 29 percent in FY21 from 16.6 percent in FY14.

In its report, SBI suggests that in order to plug the protection gap quickly, in line with Jan Suraksha, the government should come out with some standardised products for various sectors so that the protection gap in each segment can be reduced significantly.

For example, by considering 2020 floods in India, the total economic loss was Rs 52,500 crore, but insurance was of only 11 percent. If the government would have insured it, then the premium for the sum assurance of Rs 60,000 crore would have been only in the range of Rs 13,000 to Rs 15,000 crore - saving the government of at least Rs 40,000 crore.