Around ₹150-160 crore will be spent each year over the next three years in a sustained effort to address the challenge of low penetration by this multimedia and multilingual campaign across Indi
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Amid concerns over falling life insurance penetration level in India, the country’s life insurance industry on Wednesday launched a new real and interesting awareness campaign aimed at increasing the penetration levels by focussing on three large segments — protection, annuity, and child savings plans.
Around ₹150-160 crore will be spent each year over the next three years in a sustained effort to address the challenge of low penetration by this multimedia and multilingual campaign across India. Interestingly, ad guru Piyush Pandey is the creative advisor and mentor for this initiative.
“There is a lot of data on how much cover the life insurance industry has. We feel the larger problem is under penetration, both in terms of adequately insured, and as a number of people that are insured. And, therefore, we wanted to make sure that we move from the previous campaign that we did on awareness to make people buy life insurance as products,” said Insurance Awareness Committee (IAC-Life) Chairperson, Kamlesh Rao, on the occasion of launching the new ‘Sabse Pehle Life Insurance’ campaign.
Speaking at the event in Mumbai, Rao informed that the new campaign is getting rolled out basically in three categories — protection, child saving plan, and annuity.
“All these segments are different and, therefore, there is need to be catered through the right medium. When we are speaking about annuity, the mediums could be different at the rollout. So, that is the plan right now because these are three very large segments. Protection is largely focussed on the younger population,” he pointed out.
Notably, India’s life insurance penetration level, the ratio of overall annual premium collected by the life insurers to GDP, fell to 3.2 per cent in FY25 from 3.7 per cent in FY24. The penetration level was at 4 per cent in FY23.
Further, life insurance protection gap rose to 87 per cent in 2023 from 83 per cent in 2019, posing a serious threat to financial security and aspirations of familes. The gap is even more pronounced among those aged 18-35, exceeding 90 per cent.
“The new multimedia campaign will go across the entire country, in the heartland for sure, in multiple languages and vernacular as much as possible. We are looking at very innovative properties through which the products and the properties can be married together,” said Rao.
Speaking on the occasion, insurance regulator IRDAI, member life, Swaminathan S Iyer, said this insurance awareness campaign is a major step by the life insurance awareness committee. “And I believe that this campaign is not a 100 meter sprint, it is a long marathon. And a long marathon has to be run consistently over the years in order to make a meaningful impact. And I did see the plans of running this over a three year period, and I would expect this to run over a much longer term,” Iyer said.
Piyush Pandey stated that the new awareness campaign would be carried out in such a way that would look real and interesting.
“We have not been trying to get to look very advertising, which is very plastic. We have been trying to look real, believable and yet interesting. We want to be memorable. We don’t want to be boring. We are not in the good old days of saying, I’ll put in ₹100,000 crore and keep saying boring things, because people will then remember it, we don’t want to do that. We want to save your money by doing interesting things that people look forward to,” Pandey pointed out.
India is the fifth largest life insurance life insurance market in the world’s emerging insurance market. The country ranks 10th globally in the life insurance market with a penetration rate of 3.2 per cent, ahead of China at 2.4 per cent and the UK at 3 per cent.
Interestingly, the non-life insurance industry in May this year launched an awareness campaign “Acha Kiya Insurance Liya” to boost general insurance penetration in the country.
Published on July 2, 2025
