The free searches for money you have forgotten

There is a great deal of money in India sitting in the names of people who are alive, contactable and unaware of it. Unclaimed deposits with banks alone run past seventy thousand crore. Insurers hold thousands of crore in maturity proceeds nobody collected. Shares and dividends left unclaimed for seven years sit with a government fund. Provident fund accounts go quiet when people change jobs and never move the balance.

Almost all of it can be searched for free, by the person entitled, in an afternoon. This note sets out how. We are a firm that charges for recovery work and we would still rather you ran these searches yourself first, because for a great many people the free route is the whole answer.

1. Bank accounts and deposits: the Reserve Bank's search

A savings or current account with no customer activity for ten years, and a term deposit not collected for ten years after maturity, are transferred by the bank to the Depositor Education and Awareness Fund maintained by the Reserve Bank of India. The money is not forfeited and interest continues to be payable on eligible balances.

The Reserve Bank runs a centralised search facility called UDGAM, at udgam.rbi.org.in, covering the banks that hold the large majority of those balances. It is free, it is open to anybody, and you search on your own name and identifiers.

The search tells you a balance exists. It does not pay anything out. Once you have a match you go to that bank, in writing, and ask it to settle or reactivate.

One warning that belongs here rather than in a footnote. The Reserve Bank does not permit agents or third parties to retrieve unclaimed deposits for customers on a payment basis. Anybody offering to collect a dormant deposit for you and hand you a share is offering something that is not allowed. Make the claim yourself, to your own bank, into your own account.

2. Insurance: the regulator's unclaimed amounts facility

Policies mature and are never collected. Death claims go unmade because the family did not know the policy existed. Amounts left unclaimed beyond ten years are transferred to the Senior Citizens' Welfare Fund, and that transfer does not extinguish the claim.

The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India publishes a facility at bimabharosa.irdai.gov.in which links to each insurer's own list of unclaimed amounts. You can check against a policy number, a name or a permanent account number. Policyholders, nominees and legal heirs can all claim, and it costs nothing.

3. Mutual funds: MITRA

A folio with no investor initiated transaction for ten years is treated as inactive. The units are still invested and still yours; the folio is simply not being used, often because the know your customer record went stale or the address on it stopped working.

Since February 2025 the mutual fund registrars have operated a joint search called MITRA, hosted by CAMS and KFin Technologies, which lets you look for inactive and unclaimed folios across the industry. It is also the route by which people find folios opened by a relative they may be entitled to claim through.

4. Shares and dividends: the IEPF

When a dividend goes unclaimed for seven consecutive years, the company must transfer the unpaid dividend and the shares it belongs to into the Investor Education and Protection Fund. Nothing is forfeited. The holding leaves the company's register and waits with the IEPF Authority.

Two searches matter. Companies publish their own lists of amounts and shares transferred to the IEPF, ordinarily on the investor relations part of their website, and the IEPF Authority maintains its own records. Start with any company whose certificates or dividend warrants you hold, and with any company you remember buying into and then forgetting.

The claim itself is made in Form IEPF-5 and the Authority charges the claimant no fee for it. This is the one on the list where the form is genuinely harder than the search, and there is a separate note below about why.

5. Provident fund: your own member portal

A provident fund account becomes inoperative after thirty six months without a contribution, which happens to almost everybody who changes jobs without transferring the balance. The money stays yours. Roughly thirty lakh accounts are sitting inoperative.

If your universal account number is active and your know your customer details are linked, you can see and claim the balance yourself through the member portal at no cost. Where people get stuck is not the portal: it is a date of exit the old employer never marked, two universal account numbers instead of one, or a name that does not match between the fund record, the identity document and the bank account.

What the free searches will not do

They tell you something exists. They do not prove it is yours. That distinction is the whole of the difficulty in this field, and it is where the free route stops.

• A name that no longer matches. A folio opened in 1994 in a maiden name, or with a spelling the registrar recorded differently, needs the gap bridged with documents before anybody will act on it.
• A holder who has died. No institution will decide who inherits. That has to be established first, on documents it accepts, and what it accepts changes with the value involved.
• A signature that has changed. Registrars compare against a specimen that may be decades old, and a mismatch stops everything downstream until it is resolved.
• An institution that has refused. A repudiated insurance claim or a rejected IEPF claim is answered with a written representation dealing with the actual ground, not by filing again.
• An employer that no longer exists. There is a route, but it is not the ordinary one.

Two habits worth keeping

First, do the searches for people as well as for yourself. Most of the recovery matters we see start with somebody going through a parent's papers and finding a certificate for a company they had never heard of. If you are settling an estate, run every one of these five searches against the deceased before you conclude the estate is what the bank statements show.

Second, treat anybody who asks for your banking credentials as a fraudster, whoever they appear to be. No legitimate adviser, this firm included, ever needs your internet banking password, your card number, or a one time password. This area attracts impersonation precisely because the money is real and the owners are often elderly or overseas.