Increase in pendency is making fewer consumers approach ombudsmen for their complaints against insurance companies.

Chennai: Increase in pendency is making fewer consumers approach ombudsmen for their complaints against insurance companies.

Pendency, or the number of complaints pending at the end of the fiscal against the total number of complaints filed in the year, has been largely on the rise in the case of ombudsmen for the insurance sector. There are 17 ombudsmen centres across India, which received 22,664 complaints in 2018-19. The pendency was 7.68 per cent at the end of 2016-17. This increased drastically to 38.06 per cent at the end of 2017-18. At the end of 2018-19, the pendency stood at 34.27 per cent, though in absolute terms the pending cases went up from 10,583 in FY18 to 11,395 in FY19.

Despite the number of consumer complaints rising, those being filed with the ombudsmen has been coming down. In 2016-17, ombudsmen received 27,627 complaints, which came down to 25,478 in 2017-18 and further to 22664 in 2018-19.