The competition does not seem to have reached LIC. The large number of private players that have entered the insurance business in India our out of LIC’s realm – they seem to be competing more against one another with LIC as the distant leader. But LIC takes any competition seriously and is reportedly intends to spend Rs 1000 million on advertising and brand building this year (US$ 21M). This amount is approximately the equivalent of the combined advertising budgets of all the competing players.

The home page is a bundle of links as though to say, “Don’t hang around here, find your way and move on.” The About Us page says too much through its several links and consequently says nothing of great relevance. It is evident that the organization could not figure out what information it had to highlight and therefore mentioned all that it had to say upfront.

The site purportedly has a lot to offer its visitors. Prospects can look at a bunch of products neatly grouped under separate sections such as Individual Plans, Group Schemes, Pension Plans and Capital Market linked plans. The features of each product are listed but these do not really help in decision-making as the use of technical terms makes it difficult to comprehend what exactly is being offered. The site also does little to help prospects understand how to choose between alternate products.

The site does not have a calculator that will tell the visitor what the real value of his investment (in today’s terms after factoring in inflation) will be when the holding tenure is over. With many LIC schemes lasting for periods of over 15 years an inflation calculator is important.

The LIC site does offer a set of services such as a Bonus Calculator, Insurance Advisor, Tax Calculator, etc. Of all these services, the tax calculator is the most useful given that life insurance carries a tax rebate and understanding the tax implications of one’s investment in life insurance is important. But the other sections on bonus and bonus calculation are not very useful except to those well versed in life insurance.

For existing policyholders there are a couple of potentially useful services available. Policyholders can figure out the status of their policy – whether it has lapsed and how much is payable. This tool only calculates the policy amount outstanding without calculating the penalty amount, therefore the amount payable as stipulated by the utility is not entirely accurate. In any case, it works with such agonizing slowness that one loses interest in using it.