Unclaimed shares and dividends valued nearly ₹1 lakh crore remained locked in a government fund, even as claimants had to go through a cumbersome ‘25-step’ process, requiring an average of about three years to recover, according to Sanjeev Sanyal, a Member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC).
Speaking at a public policy lecture on economic reforms at MOP Vaishnav College for Women at Chennai, Mr. Sanyal detailed how his team uncovered and fixed the process governing the Investor Education and Protection Fund (IEPF), the repository where unclaimed shares and dividends are transferred when heirs or shareholders fail to claim them in time.
The official said that when his team began examining the issue in late 2024 and early 2025, they found that, including accrued dividends, almost ₹1 lakh crore of money, legally belonging to citizens, was stuck in the fund, which was created specifically to return it. In practice, he said, some claimants resorted to paying intermediaries roughly 20% of the value .
A process audit revealed that claimants had to complete 25 separate steps across three non-communicating portals.
“So first you had to put it into one portal to ask for permission to get the money. Then once you got it, you had to go to a second portal to actually get your shares back. And then when you got that, you had to go to a third portal in order to get your dividends back. These portals did not talk to each other. And in the process of doing this, if there was a mistake in the 24th step, you had to go back to step number 1,” he explained.
Mapping out the entire process to figure out what needed to be done; Sanyal said he unified the three portals using APIs (application programming interface) so they could exchange data directly, eliminating the manual re-entry errors that had been causing mismatches among systems. APIs are a set of rules that allow different software applications to communicate and exchange data.
Sequential steps were converted to parallel ones, he said, adding that the initiative cut the process from 25 steps down to 14, with several manual steps removed entirely.
The reform, introduced in September 2025, produced an immediate and sustained jump in monthly approvals. Where the system had processed roughly 900 approvals a month in August 2025, that figure jumped to 3,600 in October, then 7,500, then 11,400, reaching 14,500 approvals in March 2026, the latest month for which data was available.
Share-transfer volumes showed a comparable multiple increase over the same period.
On the number of shares transferred by the IEPF Authority across five periods; he said from 2022-23 through the first half of 2025-26 (April-September), the figure held in a fairly narrow band, roughly 80-110 lakh shares transferred per period. In the six months following the September 2025 reform (October 2025 to March 2026) that number surged to roughly 270-280 lakh shares, more than double any preceding period.
Mr. Sanyal said the backlog is being cleared and monthly case volumes are expected to decline simply because the accumulated backlog will soon be exhausted.
Terming the IEPF fix as one example of “process reform”, he said such fixes typically require identifying roughly 10–20% of a process that cause the bulk of the delay, rather than attempting a wholesale redesign of the system.
Voluntary company liquidation
Mr. Sanyal also outlined reforms to the process for voluntarily winding up companies, noting that the vast majority of such closures are routine business decisions rather than the result of bankruptcy.
He said 80-90% of the companies that shut down in any year happened purely because of voluntary reasons, yet the process used to take years to complete even when nobody was objecting to it.
Highlighting that on average about 500 days are required to shut down a company in this country, with some cases running for more than a thousand days; he said that his team traced the delay to the registrar of companies for failing to publish a mandatory advertisement announcing the closure, with no strict timelines in place.
In order to solve this, he said, a centralised portal CPACE (Centralised Processing for Accelerated Corporate Exit) was opened to automatically route no-objection requests to relevant departments.
“What used to take on average almost 500 days now takes only 60 days. This is vis-a-vis business. This is an 88% reduction in the time in the ease of exit,” he said.
Published – July 29, 2026 10:31 pm IST
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