Micro Insurance
Micro-insurance, the term used to refer to insurance to the low-income people, is different from insurance in general as it is a low value product involving modest premium and benefit package.
Although the type of risks faced by the poor such as that of death, illness, injury and accident, are no different from those faced by others, they are more vulnerable to such risks because of their economic circumstance. In the context of health contingency, for example, a World Bank study (Peters et al. 2002), reports that about one-fourth of hospitalized Indians fall below the poverty line as a result of their stay in hospitals. The same study reports that more than 40 percent of hospitalized patients take loans or sell assets to pay for hospitalization.
Indeed, enhancing the ability of the poor to deal with various risks is increasingly being considered integral to any poverty reduction strategy (Holzmann and Jorgensen 2000, Siegel et al. 2001).
Of the different risk management strategies, insurance that spreads the loss of the few affected members among all the members who join insurance scheme and also separates time of payment of premium from time of claims, is particularly beneficial to the poor who have limited ability to mitigate risk on account of imperfect labour and credit markets.