Pick your trade. Each checklist says what is statutory and under which act, what most units in that trade carry, and what is commonly missing rather than commonly unnecessary.
A cover is marked required by law only where an Indian statute creates the duty, and the act is named beside it so you can check rather than take our word. Two appear repeatedly: the Employees' Compensation Act, 1923, which makes an employer liable for injury, occupational disease or death at work in the occupations listed in its Schedule II, and the Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991, which makes cover compulsory for businesses handling hazardous substances. Motor third-party cover is compulsory under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 for any vehicle used in a public place.
Almost nothing in Indian insurance law binds every business unconditionally, so each of those rows also states the condition it applies under. Whether a duty actually binds your business is a question of fact — how many people you employ and at what, what you store and handle, who owns the vehicles — not a question of which trade you are in. A page cannot answer that. It can tell you exactly which questions to put to yourself.
Most insurance websites are arranged the way insurers sell: one page per product. That is the wrong shape for the person asking, because a mill owner does not wake up wanting a machinery breakdown policy. He wants to know what a mill like his should be carrying, and which of it he has not got. The risk of a business follows its trade far more closely than its size: a quarry and a marble yard sit ten kilometres apart in Rajasthan and need almost entirely different programmes, while two textile units at opposite ends of the country need nearly the same one.
Roughly six crore MSMEs operate in India and only about one in six carries business insurance at all. The standard products written for them have existed since 2021 and most owners have never had anyone read a policy with them. These checklists are the reading list for that conversation, written for Rajasthan's industrial clusters — Bhilwara, Kishangarh, Kota, Bhiwadi, Udaipur and Rajsamand — because those are the businesses we can sit down with.
The policy schedule and the full policy wording, not the certificate. The schedule shows the sum insured and the premium; the wording is the document that decides a claim, and almost every dispute turns on a clause that is not printed on the certificate. If you do not have the wording, the insurer must give it to you.