As per IRDA's annual report for the year 2010-11, LIC's well oiled claim settlement machinery has done way better than private life insurance companies.

In the year 2010-11, the life insurance companies have settled 8.13 lakh claims on individual policies, with a total payout of Rs 7,595 crore. The number of claims repudiated was 17,350 for an amount of Rs 336 crore. The number of claims pending at the year-end was 16,415 and the amount involved was Rs 306 crore.

Overall, the industry's settlement ratio has improved slightly at 95.58 % in 2010-11 from 95.24 % in 2009-10 but the repudiation ratio has also gone up to 2.04 % in 2010-11 from 1.93 % in 2009-10.

A K Dasgupta, LIC's Managing Director has an insight into the life insurance industry by saying, ""Insurance is not what you sell, but deliver."  "People trust LIC because of our strong claims settlement record. (Source: ET)"

Life Insurance has witnessed a slow down in 2011. When we reviewed the decade of life insurance, we saw that as on August,2011, the Individual single premium was down by (-)  62.45% . The individual non-single premium was down by (-) 28.65%.

The slowdown continues. As on September, 2011 the sale of policies was 35,88,869 policies as against 55,88,804 policies the year ago. That is a 40% dip.

The insurance industry is reeling under the regulatory changes by IRDA resulting into lower margins.

Moreover, the proposed direct tax code (DTC) also is bad news for the insurance industry. From April, 2012, only term insurance will get tax benefits and the amount is limited to Rs 50000/- and clubbed with tuition fee and health insurance.

i-Life, i-Term and i-Protect online products from Aviva, Religare and ICICI are some of the achievements of the life insurance industry in this time of turmoil.

Aviva's iLife, which is an online term insurance product, is the cheapest term insurance available for a 30 year old in India. Gaurav Rajput, Director Marketing, Aviva is thrilled with the volume of buyers since the product was launched in May this year. Mr Rajput is focused on creating better user experience and better calculators on a soon to be revamped website.

Gaurav Rajput answers questions on the data security and other issues of the online buying process in an exclusive interview with us. Here's the responses by Gaurav Rajput- Director Marketing, Aviva India

What does Aviva do for data security and privacy for it's online sales?

We have taken all the steps to ensure that the data of our customers is completely secured. We have enabled SSL – Security Sockets Layer, which ensures that data is encrypted before it’s transferred from the application server, where the Aviva i-life application is hosted. All the customer data related to our online sales is stored in the Aviva Data center, which can be accessed only from the application server. We are also certified by WIPRO on vulnerability based testing for SQL injections.