A Social Warrior safeguards lives of underprivileged communities with health & term insurance
Lorry drivers are the unsung heroes of the Indian Economy
The phone call changed her life, but little did I know it would also change mine. Last March, my house-keeper, Sheela didi, was informed about her husband’s demise in a road accident; a trucker, he lacked health insurance and therefore received no potentially lifesaving medical care.
She was beside herself with worry about who would earn for the family and how she would manage alone without him. Her constant tears and my own thoughts about the financial implications of her loss shook me. Seeking to find a way to help her, I delved into term insurance statistics. I discovered that over 16 people die every single hour in a road accident in India, and out of them over 56% are not covered by medical or term insurance. I was shocked and taken aback. I had to find out why this was the case.
Lorry drivers were the unsung heroes of the Indian Economy: they are vital but invisible. With sophisticated technology in transportation engineering, a complementary increase in globalisation has led to an expansion of demand for truck drivers, while the supply is constantly decreasing. With 6 million lorry and truck drivers in India, the trucking industry represents a sizable proportion of the labour force (2.5 %) and an estimated 14% of the GDP. These drivers are the backbone of the freight and transportation sector.
What could I do in this situation?
Apart from the human cost, which I couldn’t heal, there was something I could actually do to help. Upon discussions with my friends and family, I realised that insurance was the key to the lock of their problem. Further conversations with groups of drivers allowed me to discover that their lack of insurance was due to the lack of awareness about low-of-cost health insurance options. I understood that the dire need was to educate people on the importance of insurance. Post this would come the empowerment challenge - how to make them sufficiently able to purchase insurance. This was the inception of Freemium.
With an aim to build resources and direct access to free-of-cost term and health insurance options for the underprivileged communities in India, I founded Freemium as a social venture in June 2019. Since then Freemium has been functioning to spread awareness about the benefits of health insurance along with assisting people to apply for government insurance policies.
