Selling Life Breathing Life

It’s saral. At 66, she would be mature enough to don a new look, and step out into the open. LIC gets ready to go public. The Life Insurance Corporation – often a lifeline for the government in times of crunch – comes handy when the finance minister works out a Rs 1.75-lakh-crore cash jab for a staggering economy. Billed to be valued at anything between Rs 90,000 crore and Rs 1.3 lakh crore, the maiden public issue will be the biggest in the history of the Indian capital market. Listing LIC, a plan the ministry has been working on for over a year, comes as the obvious choice for the government to weather the rough winds after the worst marauder in human history, the COVID-19 pandemic, drove most global economies down to their knees. The toll has been such that the finance minister had to put a general insurance company also on the block along with two public lenders,...