“Aapki Punji, Aapka Adhikar, your money/capital, your right.” This is a laudable statement the finance minister made on 4 October while launching the three-month campaign seeking people to take back their money lying unclaimed in various financial institutions like banks, insurance companies, mutual funds, shares and dividends aggregating to Rs 1.84 lakh crore as of 31 August, 2025. She will surely get bigger applause when this money, not only this much, but much bigger, Rs 3.5 lakh crore in about 9.22 crore accounts, is in the hands of its true owners.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely to happen anytime soon, with the method being adopted to achieve the pious goal of being asteya (non-stealing) or adhering to a precept, par dhan nav jhaale haath re (one should never touch others’ wealth) in Gandhiji’s most favourite bhajan, Vaishnava Janato.
Governments have eyed long back the huge pile of unclaimed or inoperative deposits in financial institutions and somehow wanted to have control over them. To be honest, returning money to whom it belonged was not the honest intention of the government; instead, it proposed to use it for what it considered useful purposes.
Although it said the money would be used for public benefit, it ignored the fact that this was the hard-earned money of some people, not its own, to spend the way it liked. Despite the widespread objection, the RBI in 2014 created a Depositor Education and Awareness Fund (DEAF) Scheme, enabling banks to deposit the unclaimed money with them into it. The Banking Laws (Amendment) Act, 2012, through which Section 26A had been inserted in the Banking Regulation Act, 1949, which facilitated the DEAF Scheme, evidences the government’s intent to grab people’s money that they had left in the banks without any transactions for more than 10 years.
Similarly, an Investor Education and Protection Fund (IEPF) for collecting unclaimed shares and dividends and a Senior Citizens’ Welfare Fund for unclaimed insurance and small savings proceeds were set up by the government. As the demand from the people heightened, the government started expressing its intent to find and disburse the money back to depositors. An intensive drive ‘100 Days 100 Pays’ of RBI resulted in a minuscule payout of Rs 1,433 crore.
The finance minister rightly asserts, “Unclaimed deposits are not mere entries on paper; they represent the hard-earned savings of ordinary families,” and hints that it should not be just another eyewash campaign when she proposed a 3As Strategy of Awareness, Accessibility and Action. The avowed intent is to let people know that there is money to their credit, make them easily access it and make the government machinery act quickly.
The campaign started in October, will continue till December end and spread to all the districts in the country. It aims to involve all agencies concerned to ensure the return of unclaimed money to its true owners. The Department of Financial Services (DFS) in the Ministry of Finance is tasked to bring on a common platform the RBI, the SEBI, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI), the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA), and the IEPFA, together with banks, insurance companies, mutual funds, and pension institutions.
All these measures to give back the unclaimed money to its owners, and not to grab it, taking advantage of the people’s forgetfulness or short memory, have not yielded any tangible results so far; money keeps piling up year after year. The methods the government has chosen do not align with its blatant boasts.
True, as it asserts, the government, the banks, and other agencies that are holding the money are the trustees of the people who own it. It is the people’s money and should be given back to them, is what government circles repeatedly say. But how do people who have deposited and forgotten know that they had the money in a particular bank? There could be many cases where people deposited money and died without disclosing it to anyone; how can the legal heirs know that there is some money belonging to them lying in the banks to make a claim? They did not make any claim, nor did they operate because they did not know the existence of the money; then, which nine crore (the reports say there are nine crore accounts) people among India’s 146 crore people can guess about the money due to them and lying in which bank?
Yes, the RBI opened a couple of years back a centralised portal for unclaimed bank deposits, Unclaimed Deposits–Gateway to Access Information (UDGAM). It facilitates registered users to search unclaimed deposits/accounts across multiple banks at one place in a centralised manner. But the people’s experience says it is not easy to provide the requisite information and register with the portal to verify if there is any amount due to any individual.
It could be possible to search if the portal allows verification simply with the surname or the first name of any individual to find if there is any money available for a claim. Since it may pertain to anyone, you or me, maybe our deceased elders may have deposited some money, it should allow all of us to search with our surname without any registration; the portal doesn’t allow this. So, the exercise will continue to be futile unless the RBI suitably modifies it.
More than all this, why don’t banks or other agencies keep the details of depositors to return the money to them? Don’t they keep the record of their borrowers from whom money is due to them? Don’t they go to their residence or find it through the last known address to recover their money? They certainly do that. When that is possible, why can’t they return the money due from them to their depositors? The answer: lack of will. Yet, they say the money is yours, and we are only your trustees. Trustees forever!
The writer is a development economist and commentator on economic and social affairs.