mumbai tailormade insurance contracts are unlikely to replace the uniformlydrafted motor and fire insurance policies anytime soon the insurance regulatory and development authority irda has indicated that it is not in favour of doing away with the standardised terms and conditions although it was originally envisaged that freedom to draft policies would follow free pricingirda chairman j hari narayan has said a conservative view was adopted by the insurance regulator in this matter was because this wordings have been interpreted and settled after considerable amount of court examinations over the past 3040 years changing them may lead to confusion in the minds of consumersdespite freedom in pricing insurance companies still face restrictions on drafting policies such as motor and fire where prices were earlier governed by the tariff advisory committee tac while the tac no longer dictates prices the wordings prescribed by the committee still hold good mr hari narayan was speaking to newspersons at a function organised by the mumbai educational trust in the city recentlyanother reason to favour standardised contracts was the high level of disputes over ambiguous wordings according to irda in many cases the wordings of policy conditions have been ambiguous and can be interpreted to favour both the insurer or the insuredthe regulator is working with the council on uniform definitions of certain clauses the industry has already come up with a uniform definition of the preexisting illness clause which has given rise to much dispute in the industry they are working on other definitions as well mr hari narayan saidthe other area where the regulator is working on is the loosening of the wordings to enable new products by bundling or unbundling clauses the other is usage of simple english right now if you read the policy you will find that they are bulkier and written in more obtuse language than those in other english speaking countries we want them to simplify the wordings said mr hari narayan the regulator is also playing it cautious in the area of selling life insurance over the telephone a committee has proposed that companies be allowed to conclude life insurance contracts over the phone by using recording of acceptances instead of a signed proposal form according to irda the regulator is examining issues of repudiability over these contractson the issue of valuation of life insurance companies mr hari narayan said that the actuarial society of india was looking at methods for a standardised valuation of life insurance companies once the method was in place companies would be asked to make public the value of their business based on the standard method