Talking to the media, Amish Tripathy, national head (marketing and product management), IDBI Fortis, said, the product is specially designed to make the life insurance affordable to the rural poor. It can offer financial inclusion to a large number of rural people not having access to life insurance. Mike Wood, chief actuary, IDBI Fortis said, the unique feature of this product is affordability. The customers can pay in four convenient premium slabs of Rs 50, Rs 100, Rs 150 and Rs 200. However, the benefit in terms of sum assured will be Rs 10,000, Rs 15,000 and Rs 20,000 respectively. He said, an integrated model bringing micro-finance and micro-insurance has been evolved with Sambandh, the micro-finance branch of RRDC, in charge of covering the lives of the people who avail micro-finance facilities from it. Murali Iyer, national head (agency and alliances) said, it is a single premium product and the life cover will be for three years. Livinus Kindo, founder, RRDC said, the Sambandh initiative started in 2006 and about Rs 9.3 crore was disbursed to 4000 beneficiaries by the end of the last fiscal. The rate of recovery in the case of micro-finance loans has been about 100 percent with the average size of the loans being Rs 10,000. In the next five years, RRDC plans to expand the coverage of the micro-finance facility to 1,50,000 households. bs.com
