Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) on Tuesday gave Hemant Bhargava additional charge as chairman. The announcement to appoint Bhargava, who is currently a managing director, comes after the retirement of VK Sharma on December 31.

Meanwhile, the government has already initiated a process to select the regular chairman and managing director of LIC.

Bhargava was appointed as the managing director (MD) of LIC in February 2017, the insurer said in a statement. Apart from Bhargava, there are two more MDs of LIC currently.

He was instrumental in completing the design and setting up a separate microinsurance vertical which was LIC's first comprehensive enterprise-wide initiative in financial inclusion space. He also set up a new joint venture in collaboration with the banking industry and founded LIC Cards Services Ltd.

In order to select new chairman and one MD, selection process will be conducted by Banks Board Bureau (BBB) and eight officials will be interviewed for both the posts on January 4 in Delhi. One MD post was vacant since Usha Sangwan retired on September 30.

The top management of LIC consists of chairman and four MDs. In the next few months other three MDs will retire. Officials say Sunita Sharma will retire by March 2019, B Venugopal in May 2019 and Hemant Bhargava in July 2019.

"In the next few months, we might see all the top five people (chairman and four MDs) retire in LIC and new people coming in," said a senior official.