Ananya Rao

I am the chief operating officer of Nilakhya General Insurance Limited, a fictional Mumbai-headquartered general insurer listed on the NSE and BSE. In the year to March 2026 we wrote ₹9,420 crore of gross direct premium: 38 per cent from motor, 34 per cent from retail and group health, 14 per cent from crop insurance under the government scheme in three states, and the rest from property, engineering and marine cover for businesses. My responsibilities begin once a policy is issued. They cover claims in every line, policy servicing, our network of 12,600 hospitals and 5,200 garages, fraud investigation, grievance redressal and the contact centre.

I have spent twenty-seven years on the side of insurance that customers meet only when something has gone wrong. I began as an administrative officer in a public-sector insurer's divisional office in Visakhapatnam and later ran claims for a region from Bhubaneswar. I learnt health claims from the inside at a third-party administrator in Bengaluru, and catastrophe claims as a zonal head in Chennai when Cyclone Hudhud struck the city where I grew up. I joined Nilakhya as chief claims officer in 2016 and became its COO in April 2021.

The decisions I am proudest of made our operations more expensive before they made them better. We took cashless authorisation for retail health back from three administrators and built our own hub in Chennai. We gave our grievance team the authority to overturn the claims team. After the December 2023 floods in Chennai we paid motor claims on video surveys and audited them afterwards, accepting some overpayment in exchange for weeks of families' time. Each choice had serious opponents inside the company, and each is described on this site with its cost.

Current focus

I am preparing the board's decision on whether to bring group health claims in-house as well, which would end our last administrator contract. Alongside it, I am redesigning crop-claims operations for the coming rabi season, as the states we serve combine crop-cutting experiments with technology-based yield estimates.

Conversations I welcome

I am not seeking to leave Nilakhya. I would consider one independent directorship at a listed company outside insurance with a large retail customer base, such as a lender or a regulated consumer-services business, joining its Risk Management Committee and, if the board wished, chairing its Stakeholders Relationship Committee. I can give about twenty-five days a year, subject to my board's consent and a conflicts review. I also accept a few invitations to speak to claims and operations audiences.