Shielding the Flame

Selling life insurance in India is something like selling sand in the Sahara. Though most Indians may not believe that life insurance causes death, many of them do feel that it defies and tempts the gods. For many Indians, furthermore, land seems the only smart investment, and attempts to sell them insurance are repulsed as schemes to snatch their money. There is, of course, little enough of that; the per capita income in India is only $69 a year, and people are so busy trying to keep alive that they have little time to worry about death.

Despite these massive disadvantages, India's state-owned Life Insurance Corp. is doing a remarkable job of selling its product. More than $1.6 billion in new policies were written during the 1962-63 fiscal year, more than triple the rate just seven years ago, when the Indian government nationalized all of India's life insurance business and formed the Life Insurance Corp. Under dapper, cigar-puffing Chairman B. K. Kaul, a veteran Indian civil servant, insurance policies in force have hit $6 billion and assets $1.5 billion.

With 82% of India's people still living outside the cities and towns, this growth has required an ingenious array of promotional devices to reach the villagers. Agents are trained to sell "life insurance for living" with policies that pay for retirement or for the marriage of a daughter as well as death benefits. The company explains the value of insurance with short feature films, primarily for rural audiences, that have simple plots, amateur talent, and sound tracks in the 13 main Indian languages. Itinerant bards, telling stories and singing insurance commercials, wander from village to village. Everywhere possible, in signs, posters, newspaper ads and leaflets, appears the company's symbol: a pair of hands shielding the flame of a peasant oil lamp and a sacred quotation in Sanskrit that means "Your welfare is my responsibility."

In the process of so convincing Indians, the Life Insurance Corp. has become India's major financial giant. By law, half of its funds may be invested in cooperative housing and private industry, and it is a rare firm of any size in India's capital-starved economy that does not have the Life Insurance Corp. as a major shareholder. The company also has a reputation as a powerful stabilizer of the Indian stock market. A year ago, when the Red Chinese attack threw Indian exchanges into panic, it restored morale by sopping up $2,100,000 worth of just one stock, market-leading Tata Iron & Steel Co. So far, however, L.I.C. has kept its hands off the management policies of firms it buys into. It expresses its disapproval only by reducing its investment.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.