The Public Insurance Registry is an attempt by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (Irdai) to build a digital public infrastructure for insurance.
The proposition is compelling: a single platform bringing together information that customers, nominees, intermediaries, insurers, financial institutions, researchers and the regulator need today from scattered sources. It fits squarely with the regulator’s stated goal of Sabka Bima, Sabki Suraksha.
What it promises to change is substantial. Data across life, health, motor, general and agriculture insurance could sit in one place, much as investors today view mutual funds and shares on a single screen. Insurers could use demographic and economic indicators to identify market gaps, opportunities and risks—critical to raising insurance penetration and density as India works towards Insurance for All by 2047.
For buyers, the potential shift is even bigger. Insurance is a complex product that has to be assessed on several parameters, yet many decisions today rest on what an intermediary says during a sales pitch. Customers often have no way to validate those claims or determine whether a product actually suits their needs.
If the registry can deliver credible comparisons across categories, based on features, advantages and benefits, the market could begin to move from insurance being sold to insurance being bought. It could also allow customers to assess intermediary and insurer profiles on customer service, claim settlement and grievances. Bima Sugam has already begun that shift on the purchase side.
There is also money simply lying idle. More than ₹9,000 crore is unclaimed across more than 3.5 billion policies held with 74 insurers. Families often do not know what insurance was bought, while nominees may have no way to trace policies or find out where a claim stands. A registry that allows a policyholder or nominee to see every policy in one place could unlock that money and potentially cut claim timelines. Grievance handling could change too.
Complaints are currently registered through Bima Bharosa and CPGRAMS. A single digital window that accepts complaints in a customer’s own language, by voice or in writing, and allows every party to track them would be a genuine improvement. More importantly, if every policy carries the identity of the person who sold it—whether an agent, point-of-sale person, broker-authorized person or a person authorized by an insurance marketing firm—repeated mis-selling would finally have a name attached to it, making penal action possible.
But execution is the test.
Trust the data
Bringing together this volume of personal and financial information makes data privacy the first and biggest concern. Consent must be explicit and revocable, access must be tied to a stated purpose, and every lookup must leave an audit trail. Nothing will erode public trust faster than the perception that a family’s medical and financial life is now visible to anyone trying to sell it something.
The second concern is the quality of the data going in. Insurer records can contain incorrect nominee details, outdated addresses, mismatched names and incomplete proposal forms. Underwriting discipline around anti-money laundering, distance marketing, proposal-form discrepancies, moral hazard and insurable interest is uneven because the pressure to acquire new business can outweigh the incentive to ask difficult questions. A registry does not fix bad data. It scales it—and decisions then get made on top of it.
Design for the customer
The third is the gap between those ready to use such a system and those who are not. Insurers have analytics teams. The policyholder does not. A large part of India lives in villages and Tier II and Tier III towns, remains wary of complex comparisons and continues to rely on relatives, agents and bank staff.
Grievances themselves often arrive as emotion rather than fact: the customer knows something went wrong but may not know which clause was breached. If this is not handled carefully, the registry could become a powerful underwriting and rejection tool for insurers while remaining a screen the average customer never opens.
That is why sequencing matters.
Start with policy tracking and unclaimed amounts, where the benefit is obvious and the controversy relatively low. Let comparison and ratings follow once the underlying data has been cleaned. Make the seller’s code mandatory on every policy from day one. Hold insurers accountable for data accuracy before migration, not after.
Access must also be assisted through common service centres, bank branches and business correspondents. A mobile app alone will not reach the people who need the system most. The grievance module should be able to convert a distressed narrative into a structured complaint, with defined turnaround times and a clear escalation path to the Ombudsman. Rating methodologies should be published so they cannot be gamed. And insurers’ use of registry data should itself be audited, so that transparency built for the policyholder is not quietly turned against her.
The Public Insurance Registry could fundamentally change how insurance information is accessed in India. Whether it changes outcomes for policyholders, however, will depend less on the technology than on how these risks are handled.
(Shilpa Arora, co-founder and chief operating officer, Insurance Samadhan)