The Life Insurance Corporation of India will play the role of a mediator between its 10-lakh (1 million) agency force and its own class II employees over the recent change in the incentive package given for development officers.

The management is meeting its 18,000 development officers tomorrow in Delhi. It is also in talk with its agency force, which it will be meeting subsequently.

The corporation had recently decided to modify development officers' incentive package to ensure that they do not rely on a handful of productive agents to achieve their targets.

Today a development officer gets rewarded based on the performance of the agents working under him.

The idea is to limit the number of years a development officer can receive credit for business procured by an agent to about five years.

A development officer performs the job of recruiting and training agents on procuring policies. Hence, in addition to his salary, he also gets a performance-based incentive that is linked with the business generated by agents working under him.

LIC has recently set a target of insuring 650 lives as the threshold level for a development officer to receive performance-based incentive.

This is against the current limit of 100 lives. Meanwhile, productive LIC agents keen to establish a more profession force feel that the bar on the number of policies to be sold each year ought to be raised, said Suresh Jain, senior agent, associated with the LIC Agents Federation of India.

This seemingly falls in line with the management's plans, which under the new proposal, states that a development officer can claim credit for business brought in by the agent for the first five years.

This, said sources, will put the responsibility of improving agents' productivity on the development officer.

While this is clearly good for the organisation in view of its decreasing market share, pressure is mounting within the corporation as interests of development officers and agents clash.

One of the many demands put out by agents under their organisation LIAFI states that agents should have the choice of working independently after a period of five years, and no longer be linked with development officers.