Yes and hopefully they will be able to get rid of hotels division by then. Also, I think cigaratte division should grow (in terms of profitability) better than it grew in the last 3-4 years where most sales growth was driven by taxation increase (and not volume expansion). For this, we need a stable tax regime.
Thanks for showing me the base rates, its quite useful. One thing which should probably be accounted for is number of general insurance companies is generally higher than life insurance companies. Also, outside India a lot of general insurance companies can underwrite life insurance policies. But these are just some nitty gritties.
If I had to reframe my thoughts, I would say adequacy of loss reserves is easier to estimate for general insurance companies than life insurance companies (for an outsider like me). Most general insurance policies are written for 1-3 years and the underwriting capabilites will be captured in the reported combined (and loss) ratio in a period of 10-15 years. The same will not be sufficient for life insurance companies as typical policy lasts decades. The kind of acturial assumptions that are needed in life insurance (along with assumptions on future interest rate) impact the underlying value of such firms more than they would impact a general insurer. A good exercise will be to simply compare interest rate assumptions of a HDFC Life vs a Bajaj Allianz, you will see the subjectivity brought in and its impact on embedded value. All this might seem a bit blurry, it will make more sense if one reads long term reports of specific insurers (such as history of Markel).