Best Home Insurance

Contents are covered automatically at 20% of the building sum insured, up to ₹10,00,000. Source: Bharat Griha Raksha standard policy wording filed with IRDAI, clause D(2)(b). No declaration of contents is needed if you buy both covers.

Why is there no ranking of home insurance brands on this page?

Because a ranking would be fiction. Under the standard product rules, the wording of Bharat Griha Raksha is prescribed. Cover, exclusions, claim basis and the underinsurance waiver are identical across insurers. Two things still differ: the premium quoted, and how the insurer behaves at claim time.

We hold no home insurance claim data, so we publish no leaderboard. What we can do is rank the choices you actually make. Get those right and the brand matters far less than the sales pitch suggests. For how to escalate a claim that stalls, see IRDAI rules and grievance routes.

Which home insurance option should you pick?

How much building cover should you declare?

The sum insured is not the market value of your flat. Land is not insurable. The policy sets it by a formula. Take the carpet area in square metres. Multiply by the rate of cost of construction you declare at the start.

This is why home insurance in India is cheap relative to property prices. A flat worth ₹1,50,00,000 in a metro may carry a construction cost well under half of that. Insuring the market value would be paying for cover the policy will never pay out.

Get the rate wrong and you are still protected. Clause I of the standard wording states that underinsurance does not apply. If your declared sum insured is below the actual value at risk, the shortfall does not reduce your claim. That clause is the most useful thing in the product. It is also the one nobody mentions when selling it.

What does Bharat Griha Raksha actually cover?

Fourteen insured events, listed in clause B:

• Fire, explosion or implosion, lightning
• Earthquake and other convulsions of nature
• Storm, cyclone, tsunami, flood and inundation
• Subsidence of the land, landslide and rockslide
• Bush, forest and jungle fire
• Impact damage, and missile testing operations
• Riot, strikes and malicious damage
• Acts of terrorism
• Bursting water tanks, apparatus and pipes
• Leakage from automatic sprinklers
• Theft within seven days of one of the above events

Three extras come attached. Architect, surveyor and engineer fees are paid up to 5% of the claim. Debris removal is paid up to 2%. Say an insured event kills you or your spouse. The policy then pays ₹5,00,000 per person. Separate personal accident cover is still worth holding. This is a small add-on, not a substitute.

What is not covered, and where people get caught

Read this part before the brochure.

Ordinary burglary is not covered. Theft is covered only within seven days of an insured event. It must also be caused by that event. A break-in on a normal Tuesday is not a claim. Buy a separate burglary cover if that is your worry.

Valuables are not automatically included. Jewellery, silverware, paintings and antiques fall under Valuable Contents, which is an optional cover. The built-in 20% contents cover is for general household goods only. Most Indian households keep gold at home and assume it is covered. It is not.

Electrical breakdown of an appliance is excluded for that appliance. Short circuiting, arcing, over-running or self-heating damage to the machine itself is not paid, even when lightning caused it. Fire spreading from it is a different matter and is covered.

These are excluded too:

• Bullion, unset precious stones, cash, cheques and documents
• Vehicles
• Anything that simply goes missing
• Anything moved out of the home to another place
• Any loss of earnings or other knock-on loss

A holiday home is outside the product. So is a house let for lodging.

Should you buy the policy your lender offers with your home loan?

Usually not, and this is where money is lost quietly.

Two different products get bundled at sanction. One is property insurance, which is what this page is about. The other is loan protection or credit life cover, which pays the lender if you die. They are often presented together as a single compulsory item. Neither is compulsory by law. The premium is often added to the loan. You then pay interest on it for twenty years.

Buy the property cover separately after you compare quotes. For the second product, a plain term policy generally costs far less for the same protection. We cover the bundling problem on the best home loans page.