Industry leaders are expressing optimism about the Public Insurance Registry (PIR)'s potential to transform India's insurance sector. Tapan Singhel, MD & CEO of Bajaj General Insurance, told The Hindu BusinessLine that the proposed registry is "important in building the information infrastructure that the insurance sector needs as it becomes increasingly digital and interconnected." According to Singhel, the PIR can "reduce information gaps, improve risk assessment and claims management, strengthen fraud detection and enable more informed regulatory and business decisions." Mohd. Arif Khan, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of SBI General Insurance, highlighted that PIR can address the industry's long-standing challenge of "the fragmentation of policy, servicing and claims information across insurers and intermediaries." As per Khan, the "real value of the PIR will lie in creating trusted and interoperable infrastructure that makes the entire insurance ecosystem more efficient." The experts emphasize that "with thoughtful governance and strong data standards, it has the potential to significantly improve how insurance is underwritten, serviced and regulated in India."
PIR would enable policyholders to view all their policies across insurers including policy status, benefits, premium payments, claims and nominee details. As reported by The Economic Times, the registry would help customers discover unclaimed amounts and make common service requests across multiple insurers. The regulator aims to enable product comparison, suitability assessment and a digital purchase journey, shifting customers towards informed, low-cost purchases rather than intermediary-assisted, high-cost sales. PIR could also provide customers with information on their insurance intermediary or agent, including sales quality, persistency, complaints, mis-selling, disciplinary action and blacklisting. The system would also enable customers to access consent-based access to external data sources such as credit history, weather and health data, and receive centralised notifications for unclaimed benefits or death events. According to the consultation paper, the PIR would enable easier product discovery and comparison, a consolidated view of policies across insurers, reduced documentation, improved servicing and claims experiences, and easier identification of unclaimed amounts. The infrastructure aims to make direct purchase and policy maintenance significantly more cost-efficient for everyday consumers by curtailing paper-heavy verification requirements and reducing onboarding steps.
The PIR proposes a delicate balancing act in data management, as per the consultation paper. The proposed architecture does not require every detailed customer record to be placed centrally, with information maintained as references, governed copies or anonymised aggregates. Detailed KYC, policy and medical records would generally remain with the source institution and could be accessed when required. The paper identifies four broad routes for processing: statutory requirements, customer-consented access, investigative or supervisory use, and anonymised or aggregated analytics. Consent-based access is particularly important, with customers able to authorise new insurers to access relevant historical claims information. The paper specifies that such consent should be specific, informed, revocable and auditable, with fresh consent required when the purpose changes. Khan emphasized that "privacy, consent, cybersecurity, encryption, access controls, auditability and clear accountability must be built into the system from the outset." The PIR is not intended to disclose insurer-specific pricing, underwriting rules or product strategy, with detailed pricing models, actuarial documents and product strategy remaining with insurers even though standardised product information could form part of the registry.
For insurers, PIR would enable access to anonymized, industry-wide claims and loss data from all insurers. According to the draft proposal, PIR can enable collection, collation, aggregation and analysis of anonymized loss and claim data from all insurers, and provision of actionable anonymized information. The regulator has also proposed an Insurance Risk Score (IRS), a unified, consent-based score synthesizing insurance history from the Insurance Information Bureau, Credit Information Companies and other permitted external data sources as a decision-support input for underwriting. PIR could set up periodic and structured alerts on unusual spikes or concentration of losses across parts of the country, segments and sectors. As per the consultation paper, the framework seeks to address information and interoperability gaps by establishing a consistent and authoritative view of insurance records while allowing appropriate information to remain with relevant source institutions. The proposed registry is structured to deliver operational efficiencies across the entire financial services value chain, with insurers able to leverage the data standard to refine underwriting models, optimise claims servicing, and reduce regulatory reporting burdens. The initiative is expected to increase competition among insurers by enabling better access to trusted information, encouraging companies to compete through new products, competitive pricing, improved services and better customer experiences.
The least glamorous but most important aspect of PIR involves standardizing data across different insurers. As per the consultation paper, different insurers can record the same customer, address, claim or grievance in different ways, requiring common definitions, identifiers and formats with records carrying source and time/version information. Insurers remain responsible for the quality of their source data and for correcting errors. Khan noted that "the real test for PIR is not whether it creates another digital registry. It is whether it can make insurance information portable enough to improve competition, protected enough to preserve trust, and standardised enough to produce reliable intelligence." The experts emphasize that "the price of that efficiency is greater transparency." For an industry built around risk information, this could prove to be PIR's most profound impact: "the data advantage may no longer belong to the insurer that owns the information, but to the insurer that uses shared information better." The consultation paper has been released on Tuesday, 1st September 2026, as part of the objectives of the Sabka Bima Sabki Raksha Act, 2025. The consultation process is open until 30th September 2026 for public and stakeholder comments, with submissions accepted through the designated web portal or email using the prescribed Excel template.
