Patil was in the city on Saturday to inaugurate LIC's Wide Area Network (WAN) connecting 323 branches in eight cities - Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Pune, Calcutta, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and New Delhi - and involving nearly two crore policies.

Patil also wanted LIC to find out specific economic class of policy-holders in the rural sector.

"It is important to know the specific economic background of people who buy LIC policy, as 70 per cent of the Indian population reside in the rural area and out of which 55 per cent are farmers," he said, adding that such data will help industry to provide better cover to rural people. Patil also asked LIC to make arrangements to receive complaints from policy holders online.

He also called on the LIC to tap the potential for insurance in the agriculture sector, making use of increased connectivity through the internet. The benefits of liberalisation should reach the majority and not be confined to a select few, said the Minister. "LIC would be required to face the challenges of new players. With a large network and about 1.25 lakh staffers, LIC should convert them into its strength," he added. u LIC is exploring all existing payment gateways to enable its policy-holders to pay insurance premiums and view status of their policy via the Internet.

"We are waiting for the existing payment gateways to rope in large public sector banks so as to benefit a maximum number of our policy-holders," said LIC executive director A Ramamurthy. Discussions were on with ICICI, which already has a payment gateway in place, he said, adding, LIC was also looking at other players like Global TeleSystems.

Policy-holders could instruct their bank, which is part ofthe gateway, to pay the policy premium to LIC via this medium, Ramamurthy said.

"With WAN, persons in any of these cities can have accessto their policies in any of the other seven cities and will also enable policyholders to pay their premiums and get policy status from any of these places'', Ramamurthy said.

By March 2001, LIC plans to extend WAN to 33 other centres covering 293 branches thus taking the total number of branches connected to over 600, he added. WAN was an offshoot of LIC's metro area network (MAN),recently in place in these eight cities. MAN provides the facility to pay premiums or get policy status information at any branch within a city, Ramamurthy explained.

Though Kanpur and Bhopal have also been connected, the facilities would be made available to the public later, he added.

Y P Gupta, current-in-charge and managing director of LIC said in the current fiscal upto August 15, 2000, the growth rate of individual insurance policies, sum assured and first premium income was 31.6 per cent, 38.2 per cent and 42.2 per cent respectively as compared to same period of the previous year.

LIC's contribution to the ninth year plan in first three years upto 1999-2000, was Rs. 79,666 crore, he said adding, in the next two years, a total sum of Rs. 1,30,000 crore could be achieved.