Seven out of 10 Indian households prefer buying insurance policies through agents, finds IRDAI’s latest study on investor behaviour.

“Individual agents are the most preferred option as nearly two-thirds of the rural and 70% of the urban households prefer the services of agents to buy insurance policies. In all the four regions of the country, insurance agents constitute the most preferred option for purchase of insurance policies,” the report stated.

Most Indians rely on their agents to fill up the proposal form. The study found that 61% of households let their agents fill up the proposal form for them. These households fear the insurance company may reject their claim if there is any discrepancy in data, the report says.

“In 61% of the cases, the agents (in 51 per cent of the cases in the presence of the household member and in another 10 per cent of the cases, in their absence) have filled the insurance proposal. This could be one of the reasons the households prefer to purchase insurance from agents as the latter help in filling the proposal and in completing other paper work. Only around 6% of the households are filling the proposals themselves,” IRDAI states.

The National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) carried out this survey for the insurance regulator in which 30,200 households from across 29 states and union territories responded to the questionnaires