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ABSTRACT
In spite of awareness about insurance in India, rural India still lacks in terms of availability of various financial products especially the risk products like insurance. Rural insurance statistics still indicates a significantly low penetration and poor density even after the privatisation of insurance sector in 1999. Rural India offers a tremendous scope for insurers where the protection of human life and income generating assets is a matter of concern. Regulators have also tried to impose rural insurance obligations for the insurance companies. This paper examines the present state of affairs of rural life insurance in India and attempts to explore the issues and challenges which led to poor penetration of rural life insurance markets. A field survey in Aligarh & Agra Region of the rural customers has been conducted to examine their perception and attitude towards buying life insurance products. This paper also summarize the rural insurance marketing practices by life insurance players in India and offers suggestive remarks for capturing the rural potential and lastly this paper discuss about micro-insurance & its challenges in short details which is an opportunity as well as a responsibility.
Keywords: Rural Insurance, Penetration, Marketing Strategy, Perception, Micro-Insurance.
INTRODUCTION
Rural India and Socio-Economic Conditions
More than 75% of India's populations live in rural areas. Yet against any human indicators the performance of rural India lags far behind urban India. There are tremendous inequalities in terms of educational achievements, employment opportunities, purchasing power, health and its attributes including, infant mortality, maternal mortality, general morbidity, economic security in terms of assured income opportunities and so on. Rural India has hardly 31% hospitals and 27% medical personnel. Barely 25% of the rural population has access to clean drinking water. 97% of them have no sanitation facility. One can well imagine the poor quality of life and its expectancy under these conditions. India today is in the middle of that phase of socioeconomic transition in which population explosion and increasing migration to town are resulting in breakdown of the traditional family as a social support unit. At the same time there is increasing integration of rural and urban economies. Several studies, especially that of the National Center for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) has shown that the need for goods and...