For starters, the giant public sector monopoly Life Insurance Corporation does not have very good data at hand. The Corporation can provide the number of outstanding policies, but not the number of outstanding policyholders, since individuals often take up multiple policies.

This is not to say that LIC will not be starting out with a substantial data edge over newcomers, says a top executive of a private sector insurance aspirant. It is just that LIC does not have its data organised and structured the way it ought to be.

The mortality rates data required for insurance policies is doubtless freely available. The problem is with statistical and actuarial tools to measure and interpret that data---this is not freely available, and the public sector monopoly will not part with its ownmeasurements.

The result is that the demand for actuaries has suddenly spurted. There are 20 to 30 actuaries in India, all above 60, who have practiced all their life. There is also a bunch of young actuaries who have taken up the profession with the looming liberalisation possibilities. But there are very few professionals in the age group insurance company middle and senior managements would be most comfortable with--in the 30s and 40s. There are barely two each in those age groups.

But at least in retail finance lack of data can be made up through sheer legwork. Insurance business will require data up front for the start-up of business itself. Where can the data come from?

This is a good opportunity for consumer goods companies to look at their databases. Let us take a soap or a dry cell battery company. The data Hindustan Lever or Eveready has on its purchasers' profile is really oriented to their own businesses, but through further interpretation, these kind of data could be of vast use to financeor insurance companies.This may be a pipe-dream of sorts, but let us build on that last bit, just for the fun of it. New life insurance companies will feel the extreme lack of two `D's in their business---data and distribution network. And guess who are best placed to provide both?

Not the weak, unorganised, inefficient public sector banks and financial institutions, but the hard-headed, highly efficient and extremely motivated, entrepreneur-driven consumer goods companies. Often, they sell products in which the technology has matured, very little incremental value addition to the product itself is possible even with enormous research and development, where natural redundancy is beginning to set in with changes in people's tastes and preferences. Yet, a highly motivated sales force manages to reach into every entrail of the country, pushes the product hard through dried up channels, and preserves bottomlines manfully year after year. Spectacular growth, for these companies, is the past, laboriouspreservation of position is the somewhat nerve-wracking present.

These companies are natural partners of the new life insurance players, crazy though this may seem. Imagine the vastly competent sales force a start-up insurance business can command overnight through such a partnership: how local paan-shops, on back-slapping terms with soap or battery selling executives, can be turned into insurance outlets that will easily match the soporific State Bank of India rural branches, now being enviously noted as SBI's great insurance edge.

This does not mean these companies need to hang up their traditional boots. No way, they continue with selling whatever they were selling--say, padlocks (in the case of Godrej, say) or dry cell batteries (for Novino). And they also do not have to bother with structuring products: the new insurance people will have very good men to do that. No, what they need to do is push these products in a language intelligible to the vast rural outback, something well within theirabilities.

I know about core competence and all that, but here is a clinching piece of data, which, thankfully, IS available: the LIC has managed to cover only 22 per cent of the population with its monopolistic efforts, and a vast 78 per cent, largely in the non-urban areas, are left uncovered. These are the men the consumer goods companies have already reached: need I say more?