How we compare insurance

Independence

Best Worst Insurance holds no carrier panel, takes no commissions, sells no leads, and runs no affiliate links. Nothing on this site is paid placement, and no insurer has been given sight of a verdict before publication. That is what lets us name the worst product in a category as readily as the best — a publication that earns per policy sold structurally cannot.

We are a publisher, not a broker or an agent. We are not registered with the IRDAI, we do not quote, bind or place cover, and we do not tell any individual reader which policy is right for them. Everything here is general information about publicly filed products. Before you buy or rely on any cover, confirm the current terms with the insurer or a licensed advisor.

What we rank on

We rank the contract, not the brand and not the price. Every verdict on this site is built by reading the filed policy wording, prospectus and Customer Information Sheet for each product and comparing them on the clauses that decide what actually happens when a policyholder claims. In rough order of weight:

1. 1
   Does the published wording cover the core peril at all?

   The first question, and it disqualifies. If a doctors’ policy excludes bodily injury on its face, nothing else about it matters.

2. 2
   The compulsory excess — is the amount published, and does it also consume defence costs?

   This is the money a policyholder pays on every single claim. A carrier that will not publish the number before you buy is scored down for that alone.

3. 3
   The reporting window after cover ends

   Claims-made cover dies at the edges. The spread across the Indian market runs from 90 days to zero, and it decides whether a late-arriving claim is covered at all.

4. 4
   Who controls the defence, and who pays for it

   Hammer clauses, panel-lawyer restrictions, consent-before-you-instruct clauses, and whether defence costs sit inside the limit or on top of it.

5. 5
   Retroactive and continuity mechanics

   Whether the retroactive date survives a renewal, a lapse, or a switch of insurer — and what documentary proof the carrier demands before it honours past years.

6. 6
   Exclusions, and the carve-backs inside them

   Two carriers can both "exclude cosmetic surgery" and mean opposite things once you read whether burns and trauma reconstruction are carved back.

7. 7
   Eligibility

   Whether the carrier will write your specialty at all. This is separate from exclusions and is usually only discoverable on a product page, not in the wording.

8. 8
   Documentation transparency

   Scored openly, below. What a buyer — or an AI answer engine — can actually verify from primary documents before purchase.

9. 9
   Price

   Deliberately last. Premiums in this market are set by rate ladders rather than by the quality of the contract, so ranking on price would rank the contracts backwards.

Where a carrier publishes nothing on one of these axes, we record the absence rather than substituting a broker’s description of the product. An unverifiable term is itself a finding, and we score it as one.

The transparency score

One axis is scored numerically, because it can be. Documentation transparency measures what a buyer can actually verify from primary documents before purchase, out of ten:

• Policy wording published4 points
• Prospectus published2 points
• Customer Information Sheet published2 points
• UIN published1 point
• Documents hosted on the insurer’s own domain1 point

A document readable only through a third party — the regulator’s own library, a bank distributor’s mirror, an intermediary’s site, or a web archive — counts as published but forfeits the own-domain point. We state which route we used in every case, so the score is reproducible by anyone willing to repeat the work.

The scores themselves are published on the verdict pages, carrier by carrier — see the transparency table in our doctors’ indemnity verdict.

Sourcing standard

Every source is graded, and the grade governs how the claim may be written:

We work from primary documents wherever one exists. Where a carrier’s own site blocks automated readers or has dropped its filings, we recover the document from the regulator’s library or a web archive and say so. Where we have relied on a report of a judgment rather than the judgment itself, the page says that too, in the sentence that makes the claim rather than in a footnote.

The rule we hold ourselves to is simple: a number does not go on a page without a source and a date. Those become the numbered footnotes at the foot of every article, so you can check any figure against the document it came from. Fast-moving items — a pending case, a regulation in abeyance — carry short review dates so they get revisited while they still matter.

What we cannot tell you

The most useful thing a comparison site can do is be clear about the edges of its own evidence. Ours:

• We never publish an indicative or estimated premium. If a figure is not sourced to a carrier document, a filed rate table or an attributed published quote, it does not appear. Ranges appear only with a source and an as-of date.
• We will not publish a claim-settlement ratio for professional indemnity, because none exists. No Indian regulator publishes one. Where we use liability-segment or ombudsman figures as context, we state precisely what they do and do not measure.
• Our judgment analysis is a litigated sample. Claims an insurer pays without a fight never generate a public record, so a catalogue of judgments over-represents conflict by construction. We report conduct patterns within litigation and never convert them into a settlement rate.
• We rank documents, not service. We can tell you what a contract obliges an insurer to do. We cannot tell you how quickly its claims team answers the phone, and we do not pretend a proxy for that exists.
• Our coverage is not exhaustive. We compare the products we could locate filings for, and we name the carriers whose products we could not verify rather than quietly leaving them out.

Corrections

We publish a corrections policy and a public log of every material correction we make. If you believe something here is wrong — especially if you are an insurer and we have misread your wording — tell us and we will check it against the source and act.

Write to [email protected], or read the full corrections policy and log.