If you identify an account that belongs to you, you can claim the balance

If you identify any account that belongs to you, then you can claim the balance

The Reserve Bank of India is on a mission mode to make the banks identify the beneficiaries of unclaimed deposit accounts and settle the dues. Banks classify accounts under operative, inoperative and unclaimed.

Operative and Inoperative accounts

A saving, as well as a current account, is classified as 'inoperative' or 'dormant' if there are no transactions in the account for over a period of two years. Interest credited by the bank on the balance in the account and any charges debited by the bank is not considered transactions for this purpose.

Unclaimed Deposits

Further balances in savings / current accounts which are not operated for 10 years, or term deposits not claimed within 10 years from the date of maturity are classified as “Unclaimed Deposits”.

Unclaimed deposits transferred to RBI

Balances in unclaimed deposits are transferred to the “Depositor Education and Awareness” (DEA) Fund maintained by the Reserve Bank of India. Recently, the Reserve Bank has also announced the setting up of a Centralised Web portal for the public to search unclaimed deposits across multiple banks.

A new initiative by RBI

The Reserve Bank of India has announced a ‘100 Days 100 Pays’ campaign for banks to trace and settle the top 100 unclaimed deposits of every bank in every district of the country within 100 days. This campaign will start on 1st June 2023.

Why unclaimed deposits?

There are various reasons the customers leave their deposit accounts without operating for a long time. Account holders shift their residence from one town to another town or from one place to another place within the same town or city. Sometimes fixed deposit receipts are misplaced and the depositor could have lost track of the deposit.

How to trace unclaimed deposits?

Individual banks have provided search facilities on their website. As mentioned earlier, the RBI is trying to provide a separate portal for all the banks. Until that materializes, one has to verify bank-wise. The search facility is also not uniform across banks. For example, the Indian Bank website mandates you to provide just the name of the account holder. When you search, you will get details of the address and signatory, which you can match.

The Punjab National Bank portal has made feeding address details optional. The State Bank of India portal has made it mandatory to provide the address. But even if you provide the name of the city or town, it opens and provides details. There is no need to feed the complete address. The Bank of Baroda portal allows you to search by providing your name or address or even an authorized signatory. This seems to be more user-friendly.

One is also not sure whether all the banks have provided this facility as one notices that banks like UCO have not made it available on its website. Such banks just provide a PDF file containing all the names and one has to use Control-Find to search. It is time for RBI to ask banks to provide it in a user-friendly format.

(The writer is a retired banker)