The policy a Shela family bought after the funeral

On a humid Tuesday morning in 2019, a woman in her forties sat across from me at my office in Orchid Legacy, Shela. She was not there to buy a policy. She was there because her sister had read one of my WhatsApp forwards and said, "Go to that Shah madam. She will at least explain things."

Let us call her Rekha. Her husband, a textile trader who worked out of Rakhial and had moved the family to Shela three years earlier, had died of a sudden heart attack at 44. He earned about ₹9 lakh a year, had ₹28 lakh left on the home loan, and two children aged 15 and 11. He had three LIC policies. Rekha did not know about any of them.

Three policies, and not one file

Rekha could not find a single policy document. No file, no envelope, not even a branch name. Premiums had gone out by auto-debit from an account she had never operated. We started with what she did have: his date of birth, PAN and mobile number. From those, the branch records found three policies.

The first was a Jeevan Anand policy from 2006 with ₹5 lakh sum assured and Rekha as nominee. With accrued bonuses, the death claim came to about ₹8.6 lakh, and it was paid nineteen days after we filed it. The second was a money-back plan whose ₹1.2 lakh survival benefit had been credited to his bank account two years earlier, money the family did not know was sitting there. The third was a 2002 endowment of ₹2 lakh, worth about ₹3.9 lakh with bonuses, with the nominee column left blank.

That last claim took four months. Without a nominee, LIC needs proof of who the legal heirs are: an indemnity bond, two sureties, and a no-objection affidavit from every heir, including his 71-year-old mother in Mehsana. Rekha told me later that the cheque was not what made her cry. It was the four-month file.

"The money existed. The paperwork was the funeral after the funeral."

— Rekha (name changed), Ahmedabad

The harder truth: the cover was a tenth of what they needed

The paperwork was the visible problem. The bigger one was the amount. All three policies together brought the family about ₹13.7 lakh. A sensible cover for a 44-year-old earning ₹9 lakh with a ₹28 lakh home loan is roughly 12 times income plus the loan: about ₹1.36 crore. It was not even enough to close the ₹28 lakh home loan. The in-laws covered the shortfall by selling a plot in their village, and the children’s education fund started again from zero.

His policies were savings plans bought one at a time over the years, each a sensible decision on its own. None of them was built to replace an income. A pure term plan does exactly that, and for a healthy man in his thirties ₹1 crore of term cover often costs less than one endowment premium.

The policy bought after the funeral

Two weeks after the last claim was settled, Rekha came back with her husband’s younger brother. He was 38, in the same trade, with a wife, a daughter and a home loan of his own. He did not want a story like his brother’s. We sized his cover the same way and he took ₹1.5 crore of LIC term cover to age 70, at about ₹26,000 a year. His wife is the nominee, the policy details are on one sheet of paper in their kitchen drawer, and a photo of that sheet is on both their phones.

In 22 years since 2004, I have helped families through over 1,000 claims to settlement, and the pattern does not change. A claim becomes a nightmare when the family does not know the policy exists, when the nominee is missing, or when the cover was never big enough to begin with. All three are fixed before the claim, never after.

If this is you today

If your parent, spouse or sibling died recently in Ahmedabad and there are LIC papers you cannot find, do not lose sleep over the paperwork. Bring a date of birth and a PAN, and we will trace the branch together. Policy tracing and claim support do not require you to be my client. This work is simply what an LIC advisor in Shela is for.

If you are the earner, call or WhatsApp +91 98240 25435 for a free cover check. We will work out your number on one sheet of paper and show you the term premium for it.

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