Finding everything a late parent owned in India before anything can be transferred

Families almost always start at the wrong end — chasing the one bank they know about — and discover months later that there was a second account, an old folio of mutual funds, or shares sitting in a government fund. By then some windows have moved and the picture has to be rebuilt anyway. It is far cleaner to map the whole estate first, then claim against a complete list.

The difficulty for an NRI is distance. Statements arrived at an Indian address, the email used for online access may be one you can't get into, and your parent may never have told anyone the full extent of what they held. Tracing is genuinely investigative: you work outward from the documents you do have — a cheque book, a single statement, a PAN, an old policy bond — and pull the threads each one exposes.

Mapping the estate also serves a second purpose. The same inventory and date-of-death valuation feeds the succession or probate schedule, the court fee, and the deceased's final tax return — so the work is not wasted. Doing it properly once means the claiming stage runs on a clean list rather than a series of surprises.

An Indian estate usually spreads across several systems that don't talk to each other, so each has to be checked on its own.

Bank accounts and fixed deposits — the PAN and the home branch are the starting points; a deceased's PAN can also surface accounts through the tax record. Mutual funds and demat (shares) — old physical share certificates, CAS (consolidated account) statements, and the registrars (RTAs) such as CAMS and KFintech help reconstruct folios. Property — title deeds, society records and the sub-registrar. Life insurance — policy bonds, premium debits in the bank statement, and the insurer's records. PF and PPF — the employer, the EPFO record, or the post office / bank holding the PPF.

The table is a starting map, not the whole territory — gold, bonds, small savings and old chit or co-operative holdings turn up too. The point is to go system by system rather than assume one search covers everything.

Two categories catch families out because the money has already moved out of the institution your parent dealt with.

When shares sit untouched and their dividends go unclaimed for a stretch of years, both the unclaimed dividends and eventually the underlying shares are transferred to the Investor Education and Protection Fund (IEPF) — a government fund. The shares are not lost, but reclaiming them is a separate process with its own form and its own proof of entitlement, run through the IEPF Authority rather than the company. Likewise, bank balances and deposits left dormant for a long period are moved under the RBI's framework to a depositor-protection fund, and there is a public search facility (UDGAM) to trace deposits across banks. The money is recoverable, but only if you know to look — and an NRI rebuilding an estate from abroad rarely does, until a CA flags it.

The reason this matters at the discovery stage is sequencing. If you claim only the live accounts and close the estate, the IEPF shares and dormant deposits can be missed entirely. Finding them belongs in the mapping phase, so the eventual claims cover everything in one coordinated effort rather than two.

Institutions will not discuss a deceased person's holdings, let alone release them, until two things are established: that the person has died, and that you are entitled to act. Everything flows from those two proofs.

The death certificate is the foundation — you will need several certified copies, because every bank, registrar and insurer wants its own. Heirship is the second pillar, and which proof you need depends on the asset: a legal heir certificate (from the local revenue authority) covers many routine transfers, while securities — bank balances, deposits, shares — usually require a succession certificate from the court, or a probated will where there is one. These certificate routes are legal work, handled by an advocate; the sibling page on succession and legal heir certificates covers them in detail.

Separately, the tax side opens once you register as the deceased's legal representative on the income tax portal (Section 159) — which lets you operate their PAN to see the tax record, file the final return, and claim any refund. That registration often surfaces assets the family didn't know about, because interest and dividends reported against the PAN point straight back to the accounts paying them.

Meera, an NRI in Toronto, lost her father in Pune. She knew of one savings account and the family flat, and assumed that was most of it. With no full list, she started by gathering five certified copies of the death certificate and registering as her father's legal representative on the income tax portal.

That registration was the turning point. Her father's tax record showed interest from a second bank she'd never heard of and dividends from a shareholding — and the dividend trail led to a block of shares that had been transferred to the IEPF years earlier because the dividends had gone unclaimed. Working outward, the CA used the CAS to reconstruct two old mutual fund folios through the registrars, traced a lapsed-looking insurance policy from premium debits in the bank statement, and confirmed a PPF balance at the post office. Each asset was valued as on the date of death, so the same schedule could feed the succession petition, the court fee and her father's final return. Only once the full map existed did the claiming begin — the live accounts through the succession route, the shares through a separate IEPF claim — so nothing was left stranded. The court and IEPF filings sat with the lawyer and the IEPF process; the discovery, the valuation and the tax steps were the CA's.