Chennai: The Bangalore-based private life insurance company, Ing Vyas Life, has appointed Madras Fertilisers Limited — a central government company — as its corporate agent to sell life insurance policies to farmers and other segments of the rural population.

The two companies signed an agreement to this effect here on 30, June, 2004.

According to ING Vysya Life's managing director and CEO, Frank Koster, "We firmly believe in tapping the huge potential that exists in the Indian rural market. The alliance is to accelerate the development of rural insurance market in South India."

According to the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority's (IRDA) stipulations, every life insurer has to procure a minimum of 15 per cent of policies from rural areas. And the tie up with the fertiliser company is expected to ease ING Vysya Life fulfilling that norm. Last year, out of 90,976 policies ING Vysya Life sold just over 12,000 policies in the rural areas.

Adds Madras Fertilisers' chairman and managing director Sukumar N Oommen, "We have 6,500 dealers in the south and over 1,000 field staff covering more than one lakh farmers. We will leverage this reach in selling the life insurance policies."

However, both the corporatre heads refused to specify any numbers of the first year targets. ING Vysya Life has launched a special policy called Safal Jeevan for the rural market.

While the life insurer has around 8,300 individual agents, it is fast ramping up the corporate agents number. Last year around 17 per cent of the total business (Rs88.5 crore) was contributed by the company's alternate distribution channel — banks and corporate agents. Major portion came from ING Vysya Financial Services-a subsidiary of ING Vysya Bank.

For the current year, Koster expects to book a premium income of Rs200 crore and expand the distribution network to 35 cities and the number of agents to 12,000.