The Insurance Industry in India:A Comparative Analysis of the Private and Public Players

Abstract

The paper probes in to the Indian Economy and observes the characteristics of Insurance Industry in India based on Strength of Insurance Industry in India and Weakness of Insurance Industry in India. Further making literature survey, it is essential to re-look into the Private and Public Players in insurance industry in India as insurance companies are mushrooming after liberalisation. Further, increase in the foreign direct investment from 26% to 49% shows that insurance business will grow in India but facing tough competition from rest of the world and specifically the Asian countries. Hence, there is a chance that there may be some difference observed in between the private and public insurance firms. Thus, in this study, an attempt has been made to make the comparison of Private and Public firms in Insurance industry in India will be done based on Insurance Education, Mergers and Acquisitions, Percentage of Foreign investments in Insurance sector, Premium, Performance Evaluation. The performance will be evaluated using the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in the Insurance Industry such as operating expenses, commission expenses, retention ratio, new policies issued, registered insurers, premium underwritten, distribution of offices of life insurers, market share, incurred claims ratio, investment income and leverage. The period of study will be taken as 2000-01-2014-15. An attempt is made to clarify the results and generalize them to insurance industry performance. The study will be carried on making content analysis from the data collected from various secondary sources such as anuual reports of insurance companies, Insurance Regulatory Development Authority (IRDA) journal, and insurance journal. The statistical tools used in the study will be descriptive statistics, percentage analysis, growth trends. The hypothesis of the study is that there is no difference in the growth and performance between the public and private firm in insurance industry. The study is explorative, descriptive and empirical in nature.