Published June 2011
Chapter 1
Introduction
As the first step in helping you to gain the knowledge you need to become a professional and successful life
insurance agent, we are going to first take an overview of life insurance – what it is and why it is needed.
In this chapter we are going to look at the insurance market in India and start to introduce some of the key
concepts and ideas behind life insurance. We will continue this process in the next few chapters to give you
the necessary information to help you to explain the products you will be selling to your clients and sell them
the products that they really need.
In seeing how life insurance works we will need to make reference to the insurance market as a whole –
insurance is available for many other things, not just for human life – but our focus will remain firmly on the
life insurance part of it.
In this first section we will start by discovering what insurance is, what it is for and why people need it.
