Cover up

LET'S TORQUE

I renewed the third-party insurance policy on my 1960 Volkswagen Beetle in September last year. I paid a little over Rs 800 as premium. This year, I will have to shell out over Rs 1,700 for the same, an increase of over 100 per cent.

And that's because my Beetle falls in the 1000cc to 1500cc category. If I had a toothy Buick with a massive eight-cylinder engine, I would have had to pay over Rs 2,500 as insurance premium, a whopping 250 per cent increase.

Suppose you are a collector of fine vintage and classic car machines, have over 20 of them in your stable and all of them inevitably powered by over-1500cc motors, I swear your insurance agent will offer to dust your living room and polish your shoes. Every day.

What has happened, in case you have skipped reading about insurance policies and stuff like that, is that the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority who use words like "whereas" and "Section 110G" have recently "detariffed" (yeah, exactly) third-party insurance premium rates. Insurance companies, who have been losing money on these policies, have finally convinced the IRDA to do something on their behalf and this has been the net result.

It seems that about 65 per cent of all motor vehicle insurance policies are these third-party types, of which, I am happy to say, my Beetle also contributes to. And the biggest purchasers of third-party insurance policies are commercial vehicle owners, and not Vijay Mallya or Pranlal Bhogilal as everyone previously thought.

Now, you cannot have a comprehensive policy on a vintage or classic car simply because we don't know how to put a value on it "" my 1960 Bug will be valued lower than that of somebody else's mint 1960 Bug! So it's kind of unfair for cars that rarely get on the road every day of the year to be punished so heavily.

But since we pay the lowest insurance premium anywhere in the world, I guess it was inevitable. Still, I hope somebody out there is lobbying with the IRDA on our behalf.

srini@business-standard.com