New Delhi: An overhaul of the Investor Education and Protection Fund Authority (IEPFA) has dramatically reduced the time taken for investors to recover unclaimed shares and dividends from nearly three years to just a few days, according to a new working paper released earlier this week by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM).
The working paper ‘How to do Process Reforms: Case study of IEPFA’, authored by EAC-PM member Sanjeev Sanyal and director Aakanksha Arora, showcases the IEPFA revamp as a case study in process reforms, demonstrating how incremental administrative change can improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance ease of doing business and ease of living.
According to the paper, as of 31 March 2025, the IEPFA was holding unclaimed shares and dividends worth an estimated Rs 80,000–Rs 90,000 crore, while lakhs of investors struggled with a lengthy and fragmented recovery process.
The report says that when the EAC-PM began looking into the issue in early 2025, claiming unclaimed shares or dividends involved 25 separate steps spread across three disconnected digital systems—the MCA-21 portal, depository portals such as National Securities and Depositories Limited (NSDL)/Central Depository Services Limited (CDSL), and the Public Financial Management System (PFMS).
As the systems did not communicate with one another, claimants repeatedly had to re-enter information manually, upload documents and cross-check records. Even a small error could send applications back to the beginning of the process.
The report notes that investors often abandoned claims midway or turned to intermediaries and brokers who charged commissions to navigate the process.
The biggest bottleneck, according to the paper, emerged after approvals were granted. While approval itself took around 1.5 years on average, the subsequent transfer of shares and dividend payments through separate portals added another 18-24 months.
“Even after the approval by IEPFA, the transfer of shares and dividends took another 18 to 24 months. In other words, the whole process took almost three years from the initial filing of claim,” the paper states.
Key reforms behind the turnaround
To overcome these issues, the government undertook reforms centred on integrating the three portals using application programming interfaces (APIs) based systems. This helped reduce the number of steps required for share and dividend transfers from 13 to just four, cutting the total steps from 25 to 15.
Under the revised workflow, once a claim is approved, the transfer of shares and dividends happens simultaneously rather than sequentially. Earlier, officials manually created sanction orders, e-bills and vendor entries. Now, these are auto-generated through system integration.
“What used to take about 1.5-2 years in the old process is now a matter of only a few days,” the paper states.
The reforms also simplified scrutiny for low-value claims. Applications involving shares worth less than Rs 1 lakh and dividends below Rs 10,000 are now processed solely on the basis of company e-verification reports, eliminating multiple layers of manual checks.
Between April and September 2025, the authority approved an average of around 850 applications every month. After the reforms became fully operational, monthly approvals surged to 3,614 in October 2025; 7,570 in November; 11,443 in December; 8,837 in January 2026; 12,005 in February and 14,523 in March 2026.
In October 2025, the government also rolled out revised IEPF-5 forms with pre-filled information, PAN verification, OTP authentication and the ability to claim shares from multiple folios of the same company in a single application.
The report says the new monthly processing rate is now comparable to the earlier annual approval rate. Overall, 57,570 applications were approved between October 2025 and March 2026, compared to only 12,749 approvals in the whole of 2024-25.
The number of shares transferred also rose sharply to 2.84 crore shares during October 2025-March 2026, while dividend refunds increased to Rs 40.39 crore during the same period.
“It illustrates how digitisation alone does not solve the problem unless the process is re-imagined,” the paper states.
The EAC-PM paper says the remaining backlog is likely to be cleared within months if the current pace continues. It also recommends further improvements, like better search functionality on the portal and greater public awareness of unclaimed financial assets.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
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