India’s general insurance business is under a double squeeze of meager premium incomes and mega fire claims outgoes. How it got trapped in such an unenviable position is symbolic of poetic justice. In the rudimentary stages, indemnity was but the whim of the haughty loss assessor, as his fancy would suggest, that the overawed insurers and the insured alike had to accept like a claim prasad. Though later on, the system had acquired some semblance of balance, yet the irony of inequity, more or less, remained the guiding factor for settling the claims of the small frays that were treated