Thiruvananthapuram: Tata AIG Life Insurance has started eyeing the village slice of the insurance pie, especially in the South. The company has not merely crossed the stipulated minimum of five per cent in rural programmes, but has more than doubled it, according to Ian J Watts, country head, Tata AIG Life Insurance.

The bedrock of this new strategy is a tie up with Bridge Foundation, a micro-finance company stringing with NGOs in the South, to distribute its products.

"It’s a huge, aggressively growing market that needs tapping. Already we are the largest private player in insurance in terms of lives covered," Mr Ian J Watts told FE. Mr Watts was in Kerala last week to appoint Muthoot Group as the agent for its corporate products.

A pilot programme in Tamil Nadu to use the Bridge Foundation network to market Tata AIG products has been extended to rural markets in Kerala and Karnataka. Backing of the Tata’s home-breed of companies obviously helps. If the Tata AIG is now the only private insurance player which can afford to go fishing the high volume, low-value rural segment of market, it is because the company has a headstart over others in terms of captive customer-base in Tata family of companies.

Apart from the last week’s sales coupe of Rs 876-crore business with Wipro, more than 25 per cent of the Tata AIG business comes from covering over two lakh employees in Tata or sibling companies like Tata Tea, Titan or Tata Engineering. This probably also explains why Tata AIG’s business, despite the big markets in Mumbai and Delhi, is skewed so much across the South India.

The company has already tailored products with smaller premiums to suit the potential rural client. As against the required minimum of five per cent, Tata AIG’s rural programme has accounted for around 11 per cent of the life policies sold in the year ended March 2002. "By this March-end, this is likely to be much higher," Mr Watts said. Over 300 million in India do not have insurance. "Even given that many cannot afford it, the potential in individual insurance is high," he says. Life insurance industry projections are that it will hit $50 billion in 20 years and that the lion’s share is from individual insurance.