ITC Ltd would be using its financial services subsidiary Megatop Insurance Services Ltd to create awareness among farmers about insurance and provide insurance services to rural households in Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh through its e-choupal network of Internet-enabled village kiosks.
ITC aims to become the largest insurance service providers to rural customers with a major customer base by leveraging its e-choupal network, C V Sarma, director, MISL, said in a release issued today.
The e-choupal network has been used as a mechanism to create an intermediary-free market in specific products in select states, such as soya in MP. Insurance would be one of the common products to be sold across the network.
The network already has over 2,600 installations reaching out to more than 1.5 million farmers in 13,000 villages in Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka.
To finance the awareness programme, the tobacco-to-hotels major said today that it had signed an agreement worth Rs 5.8 crore (Rs 58 million) for a period of three years with the DFID of the UK government. DFID would be providing the money through its financial deepening challenge fund.
MISL and FDCF signed the agreement for the funding today. Deloitte Haskins & Sells has been appointed the administrator of the FDCF project and it will monitor and supervise it.
The FDCF grant would be used to cover the costs of setting up marketing, recruitment and training programmes along with recurring expenses during the three-year contract period.
The aim of the project would be to create insurance awareness in target markets, which was expected to lead to increased insurance penetration, creation of a network for direct marketing and the designing of customised products for future target segments.
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