Several Indian private life insurers, joint ventures with overseas insurers, have plans to go public to raise funds to build costly distribution networks. Under current laws, foreign investment is capped at 26 per cent.

Indian laws allow companies that have completed 10 years of operation to go public. The parliament is also considering a law to raise the foreign-investment limit to 49 per cent.

Besides, The insurance regulator is preparing valuation norms for insurance companies going public.

"We have enough money to fund our growth," Kamesh Goyal, chief executive officer of life insurance firm, said.

The life insurance venture between Bajaj Finserv and Germany's Allianz achieved break even in 2008/09 with a profit of 450 million rupees.

Till September 30, Bajaj Allianz's profit rose to 1.93 billion rupees on a premium income of 45.21 billion rupees.

"We are ploughing back our profits for growth purposes," said A. Mehrotra, the company's spokesman.

Premium from traditional term plans have risen 45 per cent in the last six months, Goyal said, adding investors seemed averse to investing in unit-linked policies (ULIP) during economic downturn.

ULIPs are insurance policies sold as units like mutual funds and the corpus is mainly invested in equity and debt markets.