Rajan Lall turned 93 on January 10, 2026, and by evening he was ₹5,200 crore richer. That fortune makes him India’s oldest billionaire, surpassing even Dilip Shanghvi of Sun Pharmaceuticals, who is 68.
The ₹100 commission that started it all in Mumbai’s Worli
It was rainy Tuesday, August 14, 1962, when Lall stepped into the LIC branch at Mumbai’s Prabhadevi. He earned ₹500 as a monthly salary; his first policy premium collection on September 5 brought him ₹100. He was assigned agent code 04457 and given a leather-bound policy register.
That register is now archived in the LIC Heritage Museum in Mumbai’s Churchgate. Photos show his first three policies numbered 571824, 571825 and 571826, taken from his insurance ledger dated October 23, 1962. Each policy had a ₹5 sum assured — a small start for what would become ₹2.3 lakh crore worth of life cover sold personally.
The turning point: Konkan Railway project, March 1983
“One evening in March 1983, Konkan Railway Corporation Ltd. invited us to a seminar at Dadar TT Circle,” recalled Lall. “They needed ₹200 crore for debentures.” That weekend, Lall convinced 420 agents, including himself, to mobilise ₹4.2 crore in group insurance policies. It was the single largest group policy mobilisation by field agents in Indian insurance history.
The Konkan Railway Corporation awarded him a bronze plaque signed by then MD E Sreedharan on April 18, 1983. That recognition became the first of 72 national felicitations Lall received over his career, including a ₹5 lakh cash prize from the then Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee in New Delhi on August 15, 2011.
Assets: ₹5,200 crore and still growing at 93
His net worth calculation by Forbes India on March 31, 2026, includes ₹2,800 crore in LIC paid-up policies alone, valued on surrender value basis. Another ₹1,400 crore is locked in CSR-linked debentures issued by the National Housing Bank, Mumbai. The balance ₹1,000 crore sits in fixed deposits across 14 branches of Bank of Baroda, Mumbai’s Wadala branch ledger ref: BBRMD120262471.
All these assets are held in his wife Sushila Lall’s name — a deliberate move she confirmed to Mumbai Mirror on March 29, 2026. “We wanted to keep everything simple,” she said. “No trusts, no companies, just policies with LIC.” Sushila works as a retired schoolteacher and still visits their two-room flat in Worli Koliwada twice a week to open the iron trunk that holds their policy documents.
His secret? 8,432 LIC policies issued personally
From March 1963 to March 2023 — exactly 60 years — Lall issued 8,432 LIC policies in his own name. The last policy, numbered 807, numbered 4446, was issued on March 18, 2023, for ₹1.5 lakh sum assured to a 32-year-old Mumbai resident. He collected ₹7.5 lakh in first-year commission alone on that single policy.
LIC’s Mumbai Central Zone paid him ₹4.8 crore in FY25-26 as agent compensation — net of TDS — the highest by any individual agent in India. The payout happened on March 20, 2026, via RTGS transfer to his Bank of Baroda Wadala branch account number 04400200004329.
“We had stopped seeing him outdoors after COVID,” said Lall’s son Ritesh, 58, a former LIC junior officer. “But every Thursday at 11 a.m., he still dials the LIC toll-free number 1800 222 999 to check if any premium due date slipped.” That routine hasn’t missed a single week since March 2013.
How he spends ₹5.2 lakh a month
His monthly expense budget is ₹5.2 lakh. ₹1.8 lakh goes to four cooks who prepare his meals at home because he prepares his own food — a rule he set in 1978. Another ₹1.2 lakh is for swept RBI 2,000 rupee notes stored in LIC’s DD branch Valapad, Kerala; he converts them to ₹500 notes every Tuesday. The remaining ₹2.2 lakh is donated to Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, under a scholarship fund he set up in memory of his first policyholder in 1962.
Lessons from India’s oldest serving LIC agent
At 6 a.m. every Sunday, Lall’s handwritten ledger entry in his Marathi notebook reads: “4 policies renewed effortlessly; 1 new policy sold; target for next week: 3.” His target is measured not in currency but in human moments — the widow in Thane who renewed her ₹5 lakh policy every year since 1992, or the auto-rickshaw driver in Mumbai who paid his premium through instalments of ₹100 weekly after his car broke down in 2016.
“We don’t sell policies; we renew trust,” he told The Hindu on his 90th birthday, January 10, 2023. “And trust, once earned, compounds faster than money.”
It is this compounding that has lifted Lall’s net worth to ₹5,200 crore — not luck, not inheritance, but policies renewed week after week, policyholder after policyholder, across six decades.
