The Hindu Business Line : LIC locating new ventures outside Mumbai

Recently, the Mumbai-based LIC has set up a separate health insurance department and carved out subsidiaries for its credit card and pension business.

The health insurance department will be headed by Mr D.D. Singh, Executive Director, LIC, while the credit card venture will be captained by Mr Hemant Bhargava.

"This year, our focus is on launching an innovative health-insurance product, for which we have set up a separate department in Hyderabad," said Mr D.K. Mehrotra, Managing Director, LIC.

Housing too costly

With housing in Mumbai turning too costly, LIC has decided to shift out some of its offices. Although LIC is the second-largest real-estate owner in the country, next to the Indian Railways, providing accommodation to employees has become difficult.

The market valuation of LIC's properties stands at around Rs 18,000 crore; it has around 1,577 buildings in the country of which eight are abroad.

"Providing accommodation to employees has become tough in Mumbai, particularly since it is a city of distances. Besides, we do not want to evict our existing tenants as we are earning rental incomes," said Mr Mehrotra. "Since these are new ventures we can locate them elsewhere," he added.

Representative offices

The pension fund subsidiary is likely to be in Mumbai, linked to LIC's treasury and fund management operations.

Mr Mehrotra said the corporation was looking at setting up representative offices in the United States, Singapore and Trinidad and Tobago. "There are regulatory requirements to be fulfilled before these representative offices can be set up," he said.

LIC plans to launch around six products this financial year, including unit linked insurance plans, conventional products as well as a maiden health insurance product.