IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Taking insurance to the unreached, delivering policies electronically to improve efficiency and reduce costs and help insurance companies ramp up business rapidly to widen their reach, was the task that President APJ Abdul Kalam assigned for the National Insurance Academy (NIA).

The President was at the NIA campus in Pune on Wednesday to mark 25 years of the academy. “The present insurance industry in the country is still a long way to go towards using electronic governance even though they have undertaken computerisation of different sub-systems. It is necessary to have a total company-wide connected environment through the establishment of an insurance e-governance grid. This insurance grid will have to have a secured virtual private network (VPN) connectivity with PKI Infrastructure with necessary dynamic encryption systems. He suggested NIA work on strategies to enable insurance firms to accept authenticated digital signature for all insurance transactions including financial audit.

The other area of concern that NIA should look at was the stagnation of agriculture business and farmers in distress. “Despite doubling of agricultural credit by banks to Rs 2 lakh crore it had not touched the life of the needy farmers,” Kalam said. He urged NIA to look at how insurance and banking could combine with farmers, research institutions, village panchayat, NGOs and government and reach six lakh villages so that the bank and insurance agencies can empower the farmers with finance and cover the risk without being exploited by middle men.

Quelle/Source: The Financial Express, 18.01.2007