"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," LIC executive director A Ramamurthy told mediapersons here.

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 Tele Systems.

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

Meanwhile, Union minister of state for finance Balasaheb Vikhe Patil on Saturday inaugurated 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 2 crore policies.

"With WAN, persons in any of these cities can have access to 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," Mr 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), currently in place in these eight cities. MAN provides the facility to pay premiums or get policy status information at any branch within a city.

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

LIC current-in-charge and managing director YP Gupta said that in the current fiscal up to 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 up to 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.

Mr Vikhe Patil said, "LIC would be required to face the challenges of new players. With a large nework and about 1.25 lakhs employees LIC should convert them into its strength."

On the benefits to rural areas, he said 54.7 per cent of LIC's new policies were sold in these locations. The corporation has also provided social security group insurance to as many as 1.2 crore landless agricultural labourers, 1.28 crore IRDP beneficiaries and over 49.35 lakh people belonging to 24 occupations amongst weaker sections of society.