Balancing Diversity among Indian Life Insurers Looking Back and Looking Ahead

Today, insurance business has proved rapid growth and sizeable gain among all service sectors. Both LIC and private players did a commendable job in developing their market penetration. With impressive achievements inhand there are also few fresh challenges likely to be faced in the immediate future like how successful have been the enacted reforms? How do the insurers, intermediaries and insured customers feel that their interests and concerns have been fairly served by each of the other stakeholders at the market place? What are the shortcomings in their expected performance? The entire organized insurance system exists only to serve the ultimate interests of the consumers, with the Government as an indirect beneficiary of insurers' acting as social security net for those who can afford insurance and for funds to be generated to develop national economy. There is always a debate about who serves best the interest of the economy, whether the public giant LIC or the private players? Each segment has its Unique Selling Preposition and this causes diversity in sense of understanding, information, reporting, perception, and quality of service between public and private insurers. This study is an attempt to identify where the gap arises and what actually differentiates or diversifies the private and public life insurance companies in India and what according to them is their area of preference in providing service to the Indian customers. The analysis was made on the basis of five crucial determinants namely Understanding, Information, Reporting, Perception and Quality using Likert's scaling technique on the basis of which mean, standard deviation and variance were calculated. Z-test was used to find the mean differences among private and public life insurance sector. The findings reveal the positive and negative gaps among the life insurer's in India.