LIC plans to recruit 1 lakh agents in three months

Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) is looking at recruiting close to one lakh insurance agents across the country in the next three months.

The south central zone of LIC will recruit almost 15,000 agents by March 2005. The south central zone, which had recruited about 14,000 agents in the last six months, plans to recruit an equal number by March 2005. At present the zone has around 1,58,000 agents.

According to senior LIC officials, the insurance major faced a shortage of agents due to the development officers' protest against the new incentive scheme floated by the corporation in August last year.

The new scheme has set stiffer targets for development officers, who are in-charge of recruiting agents.

"We had changed the benchmarks of incentives for development officers and they were not very happy with it. So they had stopped recruiting agents on our behalf," an official said.

Development officers are given incentives based on various parameters like recruitment of agents, training of agents and volume of business generated by agents.

The development officers' protest had led to a shortage of around 9,000 agents for the south central zone.

The zone recruited only 14,000 agents in the last six months compared with 23,000 in the corresponding period in 2003.

However, as there has been some relaxation in the conditions set by LIC, development officers are most likely to get back to work.

Union finance minister P Chidambaram had defended the new incentive scheme and had asked the members of the parliament to avoid having 'misplaced sympathy' with the development officers as the scheme was aimed at addressing issues such as controlling lapses of policies, inadequate recruitment, quality of agents and quality of business by arresting the number of early-death claims.

"Now, however, the issue has been sorted out and we will be able to recruit more agents," the LIC official said.

LIC has been hit with insurance claims wherein some agents were helping policy holders in making false claims or early death claims.

"There were a few agents who did not possess enough knowledge on the policies and therefore did not explain the policy details to the policy-holders. We have terminated the services of fraudulent agents," the official said.