Insured, and still unprotected: India’s ₹30,000 crore truth

There are two protection crises in India, and we only ever talk about one.

The first is the famous one: most Indians aren’t covered. 83% of the life protection Indian families need simply doesn’t exist, by Swiss Re’s estimate. Forty crore people carry no health cover at all. Insurance penetration has been stuck near 3.7% of GDP while the global average sits at 7.3%.

The second crisis is quieter, and crueler: the people who did buy insurance are barely safer.

In FY25, ₹30,000 crore of health insurance claims were rejected or disallowed — the regulator’s own number, up 15% in a year. Roughly one health claim in twelve is never paid. Behind each of those claims is a family that did everything right: paid premiums for years, renewed on time, trusted the brochure. They discovered the truth at the worst possible moment, at a hospital billing counter, because the truth lived in a clause nobody had ever read to them.

This is what we call the truth gap. It is not a purchase problem. It is an information problem — and it is structural. Every player in the chain earns when a policy is sold: the agent’s commission, the marketplace’s cut, the bank’s distribution fee. Nobody in the chain earns anything by telling a family, “your policy has a room-rent cap that will cost you ₹1.4 lakh,” or “this exclusion will kill your claim,” or even “you’re fine — buy nothing.”

The consequences are measurable. The average Indian’s life cover is 3.1 times annual income; experts recommend at least ten. 81% of the country is underinsured. Insurance grievances crossed 2.5 lakh in a single year, up 20%. Mis-selling complaints rose 14%. For the first time on record, more money left Indian life insurance through surrenders than through maturity payouts.

None of this improves by selling more policies into the dark. It improves when families can see. That is why we built protection scoring — the first in India: one score, computed from a family’s actual documents, that makes the invisible measurable. What’s covered. What’s excluded. Who depends on whom. What a family would actually receive on its worst day.

You cannot fix what you cannot see. As of today, every Indian family can see.

Your family’s score is waiting at proos.eazr.one. It’s free. It will always be free.

Sources: IRDAI Annual Report 2024–25; Swiss Re Institute; Bajaj Allianz–NielsenIQ Underinsurance Survey 2025; RBI Financial Stability Report, June 2026.