Public Insurance Registry: what it means for your life insurance

Page 30 of IRDAI’s consultation paper lists what insurers say they need from outside sources to assess risk better. First on the list is your credit history. The paper then proposes an Insurance Risk Score that blends your insurance record with credit bureau data and feeds it into underwriting.

Almost none of the coverage mentioned it. Most of what you will have read compares the registry to UPI and lists benefits for eight categories of institution. This piece works from the paper itself, and only on what changes for a person who owns a life insurance policy.

First, what is this thing?

What is the Public Insurance Registry?

A proposed shared information layer for Indian insurance. Your policy records, claims, grievances and the licence status of whoever sold to you stop sitting in dozens of separate insurer systems and become findable through one connected registry.

IRDAI calls it Digital Public Infrastructure for insurance, in the same family as Aadhaar and UPI. The paper runs to eighty pages and contains fifty-nine “user stories” across eight groups of users, from ordinary policyholders to reinsurers to the Ministry of Road Transport.

Is this actually happening, or is it a plan?

A plan. The paper is dated August 2026, went out for consultation at the start of September, and comments close on 30 September. Its legal basis is the Sabka Bima Sabki Raksha (Amendment of Insurance Laws) Act, 2025, but IRDAI still has to write the regulations, and Section 13 says the rollout will be phased rather than switched on at once.

Read the language and you will see how early this is. The paper says PIR “may enable”, “can provide”, “is proposed to hold”. Section 8 states that the user stories “are currently at a conceptual stage”. Nobody has published a timeline.

Comments are open to the public, not only to insurers. IRDAI takes them through the web form at iib.gov.in/pir, an Excel template on the same portal, or by email to pirfeedback@iib.gov.in. One route only, or a response may be counted twice.

Is it the same as Bima Sugam?

No. Bima Sugam is a marketplace where you transact. PIR is the information layer underneath, supplying verified product and insurer data to platforms like it rather than selling anything itself.

What changes for you as a policyholder

Will I finally see all my policies in one place?

That is the proposal, and it is the most useful thing in the document for an ordinary buyer. User story 9 describes a consent-based unified view showing coverage, policy status, benefits, premium and renewal dates, claim history and nominee details across every insurer you deal with.

It covers group policies too, which matters more than people realise. If you are covered under your employer’s group term plan, that cover is close to invisible to you today.

The same story proposes reminders before a premium falls due, so policies stop lapsing by accident. Our data on pending and uncollected claims shows what happens when nobody is tracking.

Can I update my nominee everywhere at once?

Under user story 10, yes. One request to change your nominee, address, phone number or bank details would flow to every insurer holding a policy for you, instead of you filing the same form four times and losing track of which one went through.

Stale nominee records cause real damage at claim time. A single update path is a small feature with an outsized effect.

Will my family find policies they did not know about?

This is user story 11, and it is the warmest idea in the paper. Once one insurer processes a death claim and reports it to PIR with the claimant’s consent, the registry can check its policy index and prompt other insurers to begin their own claim process.

It also proposes a central search for unclaimed amounts based on the deceased person’s identity, so a family with no idea what was bought thirty years ago can still look.

Can I check out the agent before I sign?

User stories 4 and 5 propose exactly that, and the paper is blunt about why it is needed. On agents it says: “The incentives (commission) are front loaded resulting in bias in favour of new policies away from efforts for renewal or continuation of policies, and often mis-selling.”

What PIR proposes to show you: sales quality, persistency, renewals against fresh sales, surrenders, free-look cancellations, complaints, mis-selling history, claim settlement ratios and blacklisting. The paper says PIR “will enable maintenance of blacklisted entities as a central service for all to refer to.”

User story 1 goes further, proposing that PIR document “commonly observed patterns of mis-selling and mis-purchase” as a public resource. Until it exists, our guide to the warning signs of mis-selling covers what to watch for.

Will I be able to compare insurers properly?

User story 3 proposes standardised insurer performance data covering customer service, claims settlement, grievance handling, financial soundness and, for life policyholders specifically, returns. That last one matters. A comparable measure of what participating and traditional policies actually returned would settle the endowment-versus-term argument faster than any article can.

Today you assemble this yourself from IRDAI annual reports, which is why we publish the full claim settlement ratio ranking.

Does this make my life insurance portable?

No, and some coverage has been loose here. User story 8 is about health insurance portability. The continuity benefits it lists give it away: waiting periods served, no-claim bonus, pre-existing disease tenure. Those are health concepts. Life insurance is not portable between insurers and PIR does not change that.

What changes in how you get underwritten

What is the Insurance Risk Score?

The paper proposes it in user stories 19 and 21, on pages 29 and 31: “a unified, consent-based risk score synthesizing insurance history (IIB), credit (Credit Information Companies (CICs)), and other permitted external data sources as a decision-support input at underwriting.” It has its own glossary entry, so it is not a stray line.

Be precise about what that says. The paper does not say the score sets your premium. It says the score informs underwriting. It could still influence whether you are accepted, what you pay and on what terms.

Could my credit score affect my term insurance?

Possibly, and the paper does not settle it. Page 30 lists credit history as something insurers want for “protection cover and surety bonds”, but never defines protection cover. The paper deals with both life and general insurance and does not say which products the score would apply to. That is worth asking IRDAI to clarify.

A tension sits underneath this. PIR’s stated first purpose is extending cover to people who do not have it, including informal workers and rural households. But a credit file is a record of formal borrowing, so a credit-linked input works against exactly that group. What happens to someone with no file, or a file too thin to score? The paper does not say.

If the score is wrong about me, how do I fix it?

The paper is not silent, but it is incomplete. Paragraph 10.3(b) contemplates customers requesting access to their own information. It also commits PIR to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, whose section 11 covers access to a summary of your personal data. That section is not yet in force; sections 3 to 17 of the Act take effect on 14 May 2027.

Paragraph 10.9 makes PIR responsible for the outputs it generates. But paragraph 10.6 routes your request to “the concerned Insurer for necessary action”, and the paper never explains how a complaint about a derived score reaches PIR, who must resolve it, or by when.

Could PIR make term insurance cheaper?

Possibly, and the reasoning is the regulator conceding something insurers rarely say aloud. User story 26 records that life insurers work from country-level mortality tables lacking regional detail, and that the life expectancy trends they receive are “more than 6 to 7 years old”. Working from stale data, insurers “suitably estimate and provide conservative safety margins”. On morbidity the paper is blunter: “there is no relevant study made and available for insurers to consider industry trends.”

Translated: part of what you pay is padding for data the industry does not have. PIR proposes continuous mortality studies from pooled anonymised data, which the paper says could “lower overall insurance costs”. Whether any saving reaches buyers is a separate question, and after the premium increases of recent years a little scepticism is earned.

What happens to my family’s claim if I die in the first three years?

This one cuts both ways.

User story 25 proposes that when a high-value life claim comes in, the insurer can check across all other insurers for similar policies on the same person and see how those claims were handled. The paper limits it: such checks “should not be undertaken as a matter of routine” and may be used “only for high value claims, especially those arising during initial 3 years of policy-issuance”.

Some of this helps your family. Validation from the death registry can cut the documentation a grieving family has to produce, and the stated aim includes faster settlement of genuine claims. Against that, early claims already face the heaviest scrutiny, and this would let insurers investigate together rather than separately. Our piece on the first three years of a policy explains why that window is the risky one.

What the registry holds, and what it does not

Is all my data going into one big government database?

Not as described. The architecture is federated: most records stay with your insurer and PIR holds a pointer to them. Paragraph 10.5 says full KYC files, policy documents and medical records “would not be held centrally by default” and would be fetched from the insurer only when a specific purpose requires it. Claim files, hospital bills and investigation reports stay with the insurer too.

How does consent actually work?

This is the part most coverage got wrong. Paragraph 10.3 sets out four legal bases and consent is only one of them. When your insurer submits policy and claims data as regulatory reporting, that runs on IRDAI’s statutory powers, and the paper says it “does not depend on the policyholder providing fresh consent”. Your consent governs what you start, such as asking for a consolidated view or letting a new insurer pull your claims history.

Your insurer collects and holds the consent, not PIR, which keeps only a record that it was given. Consent for one purpose cannot be reused for another without asking you again.

What if I do not want to give consent?

The paper does not say. Nothing in it requires an insurer to offer you an alternative, or bars one from declining you for refusing.

Worth knowing: Indian life underwriting already works without any credit score, through medical tests, income proof and disclosures. Refusing consent does not leave an insurer with nothing. It leaves them with exactly what they use today.

What is an “anomalous status” flag?

Buried in the Section 11 table is a proposal that PIR hold “a contact-bearing record for policies and claims with an open or recent grievance or anomalous status.”

Read that slowly. Most policy records would be anonymous pointers. But if your policy is flagged as anomalous, or you have an open complaint, PIR would hold your contact details alongside it. The paper does not define who decides what counts as anomalous, or how you get off the list.

What if the registry confuses me with someone else?

A fair worry, and the paper is honest about the method. Section 12 says identity matching uses a deterministic check against Aadhaar, PAN or CKYC where one exists, and a probabilistic method combining demographic fields where it does not. Each record carries a confidence level of high, medium, low, or needing manual review.

Probabilistic matching on names and dates of birth in a country this size will produce wrong matches. The paper does not spell out what you do when one attaches someone else’s claim history to your name.

Does anyone outside insurance get my information?

Story 58 deserves a second look. Using a settled death claim to trigger an Aadhaar deactivation is sensible when the record is right. When it is wrong, the consequences for a living person are hard to unwind.

A worked example of the death-claim prompt

Meena is sixty-one and lives in Nashik. Her husband Prakash dies in March. She knows about his term plan, files the claim, and the insurer settles ₹75 lakh.

What she does not know is that Prakash bought a ₹3 lakh endowment policy in 1998 through an agent who has since retired, and was covered for ₹5 lakh under a group term plan at an employer he left in 2019. Under today’s system, both quietly lapse into the unclaimed pile. Nobody at either insurer knows he has died.

Under user story 11, Meena’s consent at the first claim lets PIR check the policy index against Prakash’s identity and prompt both other insurers to open their own claim processes. She also gets a single search for unclaimed amounts in his name.

This is illustrative, not something that works today. It depends on the 1998 policy having been matched to Prakash’s identity in the first place, which is exactly the legacy-records problem Section 12 admits will take years of renewals to fix.

Frequently asked questions

When will the Public Insurance Registry launch?

No date has been announced. IRDAI is at the consultation stage and has said the rollout will be phased, with the first features chosen after it reads the feedback.

Will I have to join PIR?

The paper does not propose that you opt in as an individual. Your insurer would report policy and claims data under IRDAI’s statutory powers. Your consent controls specific things you initiate.

Will PIR store my Aadhaar number?

Not as raw data, on the current design. Section 11 says personal identifiers are tokenised on arrival and PIR generates its own functional identifier that “carries no personal information”. Full KYC documents and raw identity numbers stay with the insurer or the Central KYC Registry.

Does any of this apply to my existing old policies?

Slowly. Section 12 says new policies and events move to the standard format from an agreed date, and existing records come in progressively at each renewal, starting with active policies. Legacy records that cannot meet the standard are accepted at a reduced confidence level and improved later.

Sources

• IRDAI, Public Insurance Registry: Digital Public Infrastructure for Insurance, Public Consultation Paper, August 2026. All section and user story references above are to this document.
• IRDAI consultation portal: iib.gov.in/pir
• Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Digital Personal Data Protection Act commencement notification, November 2025.

Working out how much cover your family actually needs is a separate question from any of this, and it has not changed. Our term insurance premium calculator will give you a number to start from.

Read next: every insurance reform landing in 2026 and what each one changes for policyholders.