IRCTC’s 35 paise insurance: How it works and how it benefits travellers

Mahavir Chopra, Founder, Beshak.org, says the basic benefit of this policy is that anybody who has bought a ticket and has a berth in a train is eligible for this kind of a policy or an insurance policy which covers you for accident risk and what does this cover?.

Do you believe IRCTCs insurance plan, which is just 35 paise per passenger, one of the cheapest travel insurance plans that we have till date?.

The first thing is this is the power of people and the population of the country that we have, almost 15 lakh people buy train tickets on IRCTC every day and that volume basically is the reason why the insurance premiums for this product is so low and it shows the power of how volumes can bring insurance premiums down and make it spread the risk across so many number of people...

But now because it has become default check-in, most of us now will be covered by this policy and the only thing that a person needs is a report from the railway authorities that this kind of an incident has happened and this is typically available with whichever railway you have travelled with and you are supposed to fill a claim form which is a typical thing for any kind of insurance policy that exists in the country or the world...

Most of the travel insurance products that are available with air tickets or everywhere else, you are supposed to opt in into the product because that is IRDAs guideline that you cannot by default be covered by an insurance policy but IRDA has taken an exception specifically because it is a very good policy and it covers such a large population of the country for IRCTC, where they are saying that they can do a default opt-in for people because the premiums are low and it covers such a big financial risk...

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