New Delhi: The government will soon launch a new rural postal life insurance scheme at a monthly premium of Rs.1.25 for the rural people, Minister of State for Communications and IT Jyotiraditya Scindia said here Wednesday.

"The new policy will be of Rs.100,000 of sum assured in which a person has to contribute only Rs.1.25 per month or Rs.15 per year as premium. The customers don't have to go to district headquarters for medical check-up and it can be done locally through government doctors," he said during the commemorative postage stamp and awards ceremony.

The ceremony was organised on the occasion of the 125th anniversary celebrations of postal life insurance (PLI).

"Those who don't possess standard age proof documents can now take rural PLI policies of up to Rs.100,000 assured. In summary, the PLI scheme is the real Jeevan Bima (life insurance) for the aam aadmi," Scindia said.

Scindia said India Post enhanced the rural PLI bonus from Rs.50 to Rs.55 for every Rs.1,000 of sum assured, whereas the traditional insurers give bonus in the range of Rs.45 to Rs.50 only.

"Today, number of live policies in PLI and Rural PLI is almost 10 million. The corpus size is more than Rs.15,000 crore. Total sum assured for all policies comes to nearly Rs.73,000 crore," he said.

He said the postal department would start sending alerts about the policy status - expiry premium time - on the mobile phones of the PLI holders.

The minister added that the postal department would take over its monetary assets from the finance ministry.

Scindia said 4,000 new post offices will be opened across the country under the 'Project Arrow', and existing post offices would be revamped.