From 50 Years Ago: Record Life Insurance.

One of the main objectives of nationalisation of insurance was to expand life insurance busi-ness over as wide an area, and as quickly, as possible... It would not be correct, therefore, to assess the performance of the Life Insur-ance Corporation solely by the larger volume of business it underwrites every year. It has to be judged primarily by the extent to which LIC is able to spread the insurance habit and mop up savings in areas and among classes of peo-ple which had been hitherto untapped. And this has to be done without, at the same time, allowing the high costs of development to raise the overall expense ratio. On all these counts, the LIC appears well set to achieve the objectives for which it was set up, though it has still a long way to go before it can claim to have broken through the hard shell which lim-its the development of life insurance business in this country... It secured [in 1959] new busi-ness of Rs 429 crores from 11.5 lakh policies, against Rs 339 crores from 9.5 lakh policies in the previous year;... An increasingly larger part of its business is being secured from areas out-side the larger towns and cities. In 1957, less than 37 per cent of its new business came from branches located in towns with a population of less than 1 lakh each; this proportion rose to 38 per cent in 1958, and 42 per cent in 1959.