ValkyaEditorial

Tagged “prior-policy-disclosure”

1 article on prior-policy-disclosure.

Landmark JudgmentSupreme Court of India

Reliance Life Insurance v. Rekhaben Nareshbhai Rathod: prior policies, materiality, and the pre-2015 Section 45 framework

On 24 April 2019, a two-judge bench of Justices Dr D.Y. Chandrachud and Hemant Gupta restored an insurer's repudiation of a life policy because the proposer had failed to disclose an existing Rs.11 lakh Max New York Life policy taken nine weeks earlier. The judgment, authored by Chandrachud J, holds that the existence of prior policies is a material fact bearing on aggregate risk concentration; because death and repudiation both fell within the two-year window, the pre-2015 second proviso to Section 45 of the Insurance Act 1938 had not yet attached, and the insurer needed only to establish materiality — not fraud.

Valkya Editorial··13 min