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Industry Practice · Heavy industry & manufacturing

Chemicals & Petrochemicals

Insurance programmes for chemical manufacturers, processors and storage operators, process risk, hazardous transit, regulatory liability and workforce safety.

Process fire & explosionHazardous cargo transitEmployee chemical exposure
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The sector

A sector where the policy wording matters as much as the limits.

Chemical and petrochemical operations carry the highest severity profile in Indian commercial insurance: process plants where fire or explosion can level the asset in minutes, hazardous transit under DG goods rules and a regulatory environment that creates significant strict-liability exposure under the Public Liability Insurance Act. Cover quality, not premium, is the working metric.

Risk profile

Where the exposure lives.

For a chemical plant, process hazard, storage and third-party liability dominate the risk map. We scope these four first.

01
Process fire & explosion
Reactor runaway, vapour cloud ignition or storage-tank fire can cause total loss of the plant section and adjoining infrastructure within minutes.
02
Hazardous cargo transit
Tanker rollovers, leakage and contamination during DG goods transit create both first-party loss and third-party clean-up liability.
03
Employee chemical exposure
Acute and chronic occupational exposure under the EC Act, with elevated claim severity from long-tail illness presentations.
04
Public Liability Act exposure
Mandatory PLI Act cover for hazardous-substance handlers, plus discretionary cover for damages beyond statutory limits.
Recommended cover

The programme we typically place.

Each cover below is a link to the policy page. The combination, the limits and the wording are what we negotiate on your behalf.

01
Fire & Burglary
IPP Fire policy with material damage, BI and process-specific extensions for chemical and petrochemical plants.
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02
Public Liability
Mandatory PLI Act cover plus discretionary general liability with pollution and sudden-and-accidental extensions.
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03
Workmen Compensation
EC Act cover at high-hazard rates with extended occupational disease cover for process workers.
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04
Marine Insurance
Cargo cover for inbound feedstock and outbound finished product, with DG goods endorsements.
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Claim reality

What a claim tends to look like here.

The defining exposure is a process incident, a fire, explosion or release, that damages plant and can trigger third-party injury and property claims well beyond the factory gate. Regulatory liability under the Public Liability Insurance Act can attach automatically.

Questions

Questions we get in this sector.

Handlers of hazardous substances above notified quantities are required to hold Public Liability Insurance Act cover, which pays defined no-fault relief to affected third parties. We confirm your obligation and place it alongside wider commercial general liability.
Clean-up and decontamination costs are often excluded or sub-limited under a standard fire policy. We negotiate a specific clean-up extension where the process warrants it, rather than assuming it is included.
Where hazardous substances are handled above the notified quantities, the Public Liability Insurance Act applies and cover is a statutory requirement rather than a choice. Which units fall inside it depends on the substances and quantities held, and it is worth confirming rather than assuming.
It depends on the wording and on what exploded. Explosion arising from the process itself is treated differently from a boiler explosion or a fire-related one, and some process risks need specific extensions. This is a clause to read before relying on it.
As a rating and an acceptance question both. Quantities, storage arrangements, separation distances and bunding all matter, and understating them at proposal is a disclosure problem that surfaces at claim time rather than at placement.

Need a sector-specific risk review?

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