India's Finance Ministry Launches a Common Portal for Unclaimed Financial Assets as Part of 'Your Money, Your Right', but It Is a Search Gateway and Not a Claims Engine

India's Department of Financial Services, part of the finance ministry, has launched a common portal for unclaimed financial assets. The details in this article come from a Moneylife report dated June 1, 2026, which says the launch took place at a review meeting of public sector banks in the previous week. Moneylife is an Indian personal-finance outlet, and parts of its report are its own commentary. The government's own notification was not reviewed. In this article, 1 lakh is 100,000, 1 crore is 10 million, and 1 lakh crore is 1 trillion rupees.

What was launched

The portal is at www.unclaimedassetsportal.in. It was developed with the PSB Alliance, a group of public sector banks, and was launched by the secretary of the Department of Financial Services, M Nagaraju. It covers unclaimed bank deposits, insurance claims, shares, dividends and mutual fund investments. According to the report, it acts as a single gateway that links users to search facilities run by banks, insurers, mutual funds and other institutions, so that people do not have to visit each institution's website separately. It forms part of the Department's 'Your Money, Your Right' campaign, which involves financial regulators and banks. Nagaraju is quoted as saying the portal would significantly improve citizen convenience by offering several search facilities on one platform.

The systems that already existed

Before this launch, people had to use several separate systems. The report lists the Reserve Bank of India's UDGAM portal for bank deposits, the Securities and Exchange Board of India's MITRA platform for mutual funds and securities, the insurance regulator IRDAI's Bima Bharosa for insurance, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs' Investor Education and Protection Fund for shares and dividends, and the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation's systems for provident fund money. The report does not say whether the new portal connects to each of those systems directly or simply points users to institutions' own search tools, so this article does not claim a direct link to any particular one. The report mentions the investor protection fund authority only as a coordinator of the campaign.

How much is at stake

The report offers several figures, with their sources. Over Rs 2 lakh crore was in inactive bank accounts approaching unclaimed status, according to Moneylife's reporting in August 2024. Banks transferred Rs 1.44 lakh crore to the Reserve Bank's Depositor Education and Awareness Fund over five years, but only Rs 5,729 crore was refunded to claimants. Dividing the second figure by the first, an exercise done here and not in the report, indicates that about 4% of the transferred money has been refunded. A petition in the Supreme Court by Aakash Goel cites more than Rs 3.5 lakh crore in unclaimed assets; the Court has issued notice, and the outcome is pending. These figures are measured at different dates and on different bases, so they should not be added together or treated as a single total.

The earlier campaign

The earlier campaign, called Aapki Poonji Aapka Adhikar, ran from October to December and returned Rs 1,887 crore to claimants and nominees, according to the report. Nagaraju acknowledged that this figure may seem modest and described it as the initial impact of awareness-building. Set beside the Rs 5,729 crore refunded from the Depositor Education and Awareness Fund, the campaign figure is a useful reference for what outreach can achieve, though the report does not say whether the two sums overlap.

What the portal does not do

The report is explicit that the portal is a search gateway. It does not explain how claims are filed or processed. Moneylife adds a critical note: banks often fail to publish lists of unclaimed accounts, demand excessive documentation and delay legitimate claims, and these problems hit senior citizens and legal heirs hardest. These are the publication's assessments and not findings of the government. The report says the Supreme Court's response and the government's regulatory response remain open questions.

What a person can do now

Anyone looking for a relative's savings or an old policy can search through the portal, and can also use the regulators' own tools that the report lists. A claimant will generally need to establish identity and, for an heir, a legal connection to the account holder, and the process differs by institution. The report does not set out the steps, so claimants should follow the instructions of the institution that holds the money.

What to watch

Three points will show whether the portal makes a difference: whether institutions keep their data current, whether claim processing times fall, and whether the amounts returned each year rise above the levels the report cites. The report gives no targets for any of these.

Why the numbers are hard to compare

The report mixes three kinds of figures: balances in accounts approaching dormancy, money already transferred to a regulator-run fund, and amounts returned to claimants. Each answers a different question. The first says how much might one day become unclaimed, the second how much has already left banks' books, and the third how much has actually reached owners. Only the third measures success for the people the portal is meant to serve.

Limits

This article relies on one publication's report and does not reproduce the government's notification. It is general information, not legal or financial advice.