There is a field on the form that says nominee, and almost everybody who fills it in believes they have just given somebody something. It feels like the moment of decision in the whole document — the line that says where the money goes. It is not that line. In Sarbati Devi v. Usha Devi the Supreme Court held that a nomination does not have the effect of conferring on the nominee any beneficial interest, and only indicates the hand which is authorised to receive the amount. The money remains claimable by the heirs under the law of succession that applies. The nominee receives; who keeps it is a separate question with a separate answer. Then 2015 changed part of this, and only part. Sub-section (7) of section 39 made a closed list of close relatives beneficially entitled — parents, spouse, children, or spouse and children, or any of them. Nominate a brother, a sister, a nephew or a friend and you are back in the older position entirely. Then the part that tends to get left out elsewhere. How far that 2015 provision actually reaches is not settled. High Courts have read it differently, some treating a close relative as entitled unless a contrary intention appears, others asking for evidence that ownership was intended. We would rather tell you that than offer you a confidence the courts have not reached. One more thing, because it is the error that quietly undoes careful planning. A nomination does not override a will. In 2023 the Supreme Court put it as plainly as it can be put: there is no third mode of succession. So what is left to do is small, cheap and almost universally neglected. Find out what your insurer has actually registered — not what you remember instructing. State the shares. Name an appointee for any minor. And make the will that a free form cannot replace.
What this guide covers
There are two ways property moves on a death in India. Under a will, or, where there is none, under the succession law that applies to the person who died.
A nomination is not a third one. It looks like it ought to be — it is a written instruction, signed by the owner, saying who is to receive a specific asset, held on file by an institution that will act on it. Every feature of it resembles a disposition.
But it does not dispose of anything. It identifies a person the institution may pay. What that person may keep is answered by the will, or by succession law, and not by the nomination form.
Almost everything else on this page follows from that one sentence, including the parts where the law has since moved.
The phrase the Supreme Court used in 1983 is the most useful eight words on this subject, and they are worth carrying around.
A nomination, the Court said, only indicates the hand which is authorised to receive the amount. Not the person entitled to it. The hand.
It is a deliberately mechanical image, and it is accurate. The insurer has a sum to pay and a legal need to pay it to somebody who can give a valid discharge. The nomination answers that need and stops there.
Which is also why the nomination is genuinely useful rather than a formality. Without it the insurer has nobody it can safely pay, and the family has to establish entitlement before anything at all is released. That is the problem the nomination solves, and it is a real one.
Since this is the foundation of the whole subject, it is worth having the holding itself rather than a paraphrase of it.
In Smt. Sarbati Devi v. Smt. Usha Devi, the Supreme Court held that a nomination under section 39 of the Insurance Act, 1938 does not have the effect of conferring on the nominee any beneficial interest in the amount payable under the policy on the death of the assured. The nomination only indicates the hand which is authorised to receive the amount, payment to whom discharges the insurer. The amount can be claimed by the heirs of the assured in accordance with the law of succession governing them.
The Court set aside the decisions below and overruled two earlier High Court decisions which had treated a nominee as an absolute owner — which tells you that the opposite view was once held by courts too, and not only by families.
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It would be easy to treat this as a piece of public ignorance. It is not, and the reasons people get it wrong are good ones.
A related and equally stubborn belief sits next door, and it costs families real money. Holding a private health policy is widely assumed to exclude a household from the national health scheme. The Ministry's own release says the opposite. Buying cover takes nothing away, and workers inside the State insurance system keep the entitlement too. The two arrangements run in parallel, which tells most where a policy's own age ceiling has quietly dropped the oldest member of the house. Our Ayushman card page deals with it.
The form itself invites the belief. It asks for a nominee, singular, in a box, beside a question about where the money should go — and nothing on it says that naming somebody is not giving them anything. No insurer prints that sentence, and there is no reason they would.
The word does the rest of the work. In ordinary use, to nominate somebody is to select them for something they will then have. Nobody nominates a person for a thing that then goes to somebody else.
So this is not a failure of attention. It is a term of art that reads exactly like a plain word and means something narrower, in a document nobody has a reason to read twice. The misunderstanding is built into the vocabulary.
And then the event itself confirms the error, which is why it survives so well.
A death occurs. The nominee produces the documents, the insurer processes the claim, and the money is credited to the nominee’s own account. No court is involved, nobody asks about heirs, and no step in the process is addressed to anybody else.
From the inside, that is indistinguishable from inheriting. The family watches an institution transfer a large sum to one named person without question, and concludes — reasonably — that the institution has recognised ownership.
It has recognised nothing of the kind. It has discharged its own liability to the person it was authorised to pay. Whether that person keeps the money is a question the insurer has no role in, no view on, and no reason to raise.
In most families they are used interchangeably, and the two words answer different questions asked by different people.
A nominee is a creature of the contract and the statute governing it. The policyholder chooses one, the insurer records it, and its whole function is to tell the insurer whom to pay.
An heir is a creature of succession law. Nobody chooses an heir; the law identifies them, by relationship, under the personal law that applies. A policyholder cannot add to or subtract from that list by filling in a form.
The clean way to hold it. You pick the nominee; the law picks the heirs. They are frequently the same people, which is why the distinction stays invisible for years — and the cases are the ones where they are not.
Almost every argument we see on this subject comes from two questions being treated as one.
The first is who may collect the money. The second is who is entitled to keep it. The nomination answers the first, completely and conveniently. It does not address the second at all.
So a sentence like the insurer paid me, therefore it is mine is not a weak argument. It is two correct halves joined by a wrong therefore, and the person making it usually believes it entirely.
Separating the two questions out loud is the single most useful thing a family can do before anybody becomes entrenched. Nobody disputes that the insurer paid correctly. The question is what the payment settled, and the answer is only the first half.
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If you are filling in a nomination today, here is what follows practically from all of the above.
You are choosing who will be able to collect quickly and without a court. That is worth getting right, because the alternative imposes real delay and cost on people at the worst time. But you are not deciding who ends up with the money, unless the person falls inside a list dealt with in the next group of sections.
Which means the nomination should be chosen for reliability and convenience, and the distribution should be dealt with elsewhere. Those are different criteria and they sometimes point at different people.
It is a fair question to ask at this point, and the answer is a clear no — but for a reason that is rarely stated.
Its value is in time, at the one moment when time is expensive. A family with a valid nomination gets the money released on a claim form and a death certificate. A family without one is asked to establish entitlement first, which can mean a succession certificate, which can mean months and a court.
So the nomination is not a small version of a will. It is a different tool solving a different problem: not who should have this, but who can be paid without delay. Judged as the second, it is excellent. Judged as the first, it fails, because it was never that.
Where there is no nomination and a death has already happened, succession certificate and legal heir certificate are the routes that then open up, and both are slower than the form you are being asked to sign today.
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Everything above describes the law as it stood from 1983 onwards, and for most nominees it still describes it. But Parliament did move, and it moved narrowly.
The Insurance Laws (Amendment) Act of 2015 inserted new sub-sections into section 39, and one of them — sub-section (7) — carved out a class of nominee who is not merely a receiver.
Read the shape of the change rather than its detail first. Parliament did not reverse Sarbati Devi. It left the general rule standing and lifted one group of nominees out of it, which tells you that the general rule was understood and deliberately kept.
The group is defined by relationship, and the wording is worth attending to because the list is shorter than people expect.
Sub-section (7) applies where the holder of a policy of insurance on his own life nominates his parents, or his spouse, or his children, or his spouse and children, or any of them. Those nominees are beneficially entitled to the amount payable.
Parents. Spouse. Children. Or a combination of them. That is the whole list, and the phrase or any of them extends the combinations rather than the categories.
So a father, a mother, a husband, a wife, a son, a daughter — inside. A brother, a sister, a grandchild, a nephew, a daughter-in-law, a business partner, a friend — outside.
The words do a lot of work and are worth unpacking, because the difference between the two kinds of nominee is the difference between keeping and passing on.
A nominee who is not beneficially entitled receives the money and the question of who is entitled to it is then answered by succession law — so the amount effectively travels through that nominee to the people the law identifies.
A nominee who is beneficially entitled receives the money for themselves. The travelling stops at them.
The practical test, as a question. When this person is paid, is the question of entitlement over, or has it only begun? For a parent, spouse or child since 2015, Parliament intended it to be over. For everybody else it has only begun.
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And then the sub-section carries its own qualification, which is easy to read past and occasionally decisive.
The beneficial entitlement does not apply where it is proved that, having regard to the nature of his title to the policy, the policyholder could not have conferred any such beneficial title on the nominee.
In plain terms: you cannot give away more than you held. If the policyholder’s own interest in the policy was limited — because of how it came to him, or what rights he actually had in it — a nomination cannot manufacture a better title in the nominee than the policyholder had himself.
This will not arise in an ordinary case where somebody buys a policy on their own life with their own money. It arises where the policy, or the interest in it, came from somewhere else, and that is a question for an advocate on the actual documents rather than for a general page.
Worth stating in its own section because it is the half of the 2015 change that nobody mentions.
The amendment did not improve the position of nominees generally. It improved the position of one defined group. For every nominee outside that group, the law is exactly what the Supreme Court said it was in 1983 — the hand authorised to receive, and nothing more.
That matters because a great many nominations in India are of people outside the list. A sibling named before marriage. A friend named by somebody with no close family at the time. A parent-in-law. These are all still receivers.
And the person nominated is usually the last to know it. They have been told for years that they are the nominee, in a tone that implies provision has been made, and they discover the distinction at the point of a claim.
People ask whether a particularly close relationship can be read into the list, and the answer is that the provision does not work that way.
It is drawn by relationship, not by closeness. A sister who lived in the same house for forty years and cared for the policyholder is outside it; an estranged adult child who has not been in contact for twenty years is inside it. The provision does not weigh the relationship, only name it.
Which is an argument for a will rather than a complaint about the section. If your intentions do not match a list drawn by relationship, a form drawn by relationship is the wrong instrument to carry them, and no amount of care filling it in will fix that.
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A sequence nobody plans for, and the Act addresses it for the close-family group specifically.
Sub-section (8) deals with the case where a nominee to whom sub-section (7) applies dies after the person whose life is insured but before the amount is paid. In that situation the share passes to the heirs or legal representatives of that nominee.
So it does not fall back into your estate. It continues down the line it had already entered. Which is logical once you accept that such a nominee was beneficially entitled: the entitlement had already vested, so it devolves as that person’s own.
The opposite case — a nominee who dies before you — is handled differently, and it is dealt with further down under what happens when there is nobody left named.
One guard-rail worth knowing about, because a certain kind of planning runs into it.
Sub-section (9) provides that nothing in sub-sections (7) and (8) shall operate to destroy or impede the right of any creditor to be paid out of the proceeds of a policy of life insurance.
So the beneficial-nominee provision is not a device for moving money out of the reach of somebody who is owed it. Whatever the nomination says, a creditor’s right survives it, and a nomination made with that purpose in view achieves nothing except to look like it was made with that purpose in view.
Now the section that most pages on this subject leave out, and the reason this one is more cautious than confident.
How far sub-section (7) actually goes has not been read uniformly by the High Courts. Some have treated a close-family nominee as entitled to keep the money unless a contrary intention is shown. Others have asked for evidence that the policyholder meant to confer ownership rather than merely name a receiver. At least one has held that even a nominee within the sub-section cannot simply extinguish the rights of other heirs, and that the question has to be worked out in civil proceedings.
So the honest answer to “is my spouse’s position safe?” is that Parliament intended it to be and the courts have not spoken with one voice. Anybody who gives you a flat yes is telling you about the statute and leaving out the litigation.
We would rather print that than a cleaner answer. The clean answer would read better and would mislead.
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Which raises the sensible question: what does a person actually do about a provision the courts have not finished with?
The answer is not to wait, and it is not to worry. It is to make the rest of the arrangement so clear that the unsettled point never has to be decided in your family’s case.
The whole purpose of a will, here, is to make the argument unnecessary. If the nomination names your spouse and a will says in terms that the policy proceeds are to be hers, nobody needs a court to decide how far sub-section (7) reaches. The two documents say the same thing and the question does not arise.
That is the single most useful consequence of knowing the law is unsettled: it converts a legal uncertainty into a drafting task, and the drafting task is cheap.
This is the question we are asked more than any other on this subject, usually by somebody who has just made a will and wants to know whether the old nominations still matter.
They matter for collection. They do not override the will.
A nomination is not a testamentary instrument. It is not executed as one, it is not witnessed as one, it is not revoked as one, and it does not purport to distribute an estate. Treating it as capable of defeating a will would make every form filled in at a bank counter a potential codicil.
But do not take that as licence to leave the nominations stale. A will that says one thing and a nomination that names somebody else produces exactly the dispute the will was made to prevent — correct in law, expensive in practice.
The clearest recent statement from the Supreme Court on nomination against succession came in 2023, and it is worth describing accurately rather than borrowing more from it than it says.
In Shakti Yezdani v. Jayanand Jayant Salgaonkar, decided in December 2023, the Court refused to treat a nominee as taking full title on the holder’s death. Its reasoning was about purpose: the asset is placed with the nominee for a limited administrative one, so that an institution has somebody to deal with immediately after a death and the asset is not left in limbo while legal representatives organise themselves. Succession, the Court said, is not among the things that provision was doing — there is, in its phrase, no third mode of succession.
Our will drafting page sets that judgment out at greater length, with the passages quoted, and we would rather send you there than reproduce it here at second hand.
The honest qualification. That case was about shares and depository nominations under company law, not about a life insurance policy under section 39. We cite it for the principle it states about nomination and succession generally, and we are not going to pretend it decided the insurance question.
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That phrase deserves a section of its own, because five words of it do more explaining than this entire page.
Property moves on a death along one of two paths: what the will directs, or what succession law directs where there is no will. Nothing else is a path. A nomination resembles one closely enough to be mistaken for it and is not one.
Hold that, and every related question answers itself. Can a nomination disinherit somebody? No — it is not a mode of succession. Can it be used instead of a will? No, for the same reason. Can it be made in favour of somebody who would otherwise get nothing? It can be made, and it will get them paid, and it will not make the money theirs unless they fall inside sub-section (7).
Out of all of this comes one error, and in our experience it is the most frequent mistake in Indian household planning.
Somebody fills in nominations across their policies, accounts and investments, each naming the person they intend to benefit, and concludes that the arrangement is complete. No will is made, because it feels as though the work has already been done.
What has actually been built is a set of collection instructions with no distribution behind them. Every institution knows whom to pay, and nothing anywhere records who is to keep what.
And it is a very comfortable error to live with, because it produces no symptom at all during the lifetime of the person who made it.
The pattern is consistent enough to describe, and the point of describing it is that it is avoidable at every step.
Policies bought over twenty years, each with a nominee chosen for good reasons at the time. No will, because the nominations were understood to be the plan. A death. Institutions pay the named people, promptly and correctly, in different amounts to different relatives according to decisions taken separately across two decades.
The resulting distribution is not what anybody intended, because nobody ever looked at the nominations as a set. It is the accumulated residue of a dozen separate afternoons.
Then the family has to decide whether to accept an allocation nobody chose, or to argue about it. Both outcomes are worse than the hour it would have taken to look at the list once.
Put side by side, because this is the table worth keeping.
| Nomination | Will | |
|---|---|---|
| Answers | Who may be paid | Who is to keep it |
| Covers | One policy or account | Everything you own |
| Unequal shares | Only if you state them, per policy | Yes, across the estate |
| Conditions, exclusions, an executor | No field for any of it | Yes |
| Cost and effort | Almost nothing | Real, but once |
| Held by | The insurer | You, and whoever you tell |
Read down the first column and it becomes obvious why a nomination cannot do the job of the second. It has no room to.
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The practical ideal is simple to state and almost never achieved: the nomination and the will should point at the same person for the same asset.
When they agree, the nomination does what it is good at — getting money released quickly without a court — and the will does what it is good at, which is saying who keeps it. Nobody has to litigate the relationship between them.
So the sequence that works is: make the will, then bring the nominations into line with it. Most people do it the other way round, if they do it at all, which is how the two end up contradicting each other on paper.
Our will drafting work is the other half of this, and we would rather send somebody there than let them leave with a tidy nomination and no will.
And if they already contradict each other, which happens constantly, what then.
The will governs who is entitled; the nomination governs who gets paid. So the money is released to the nominee and the person entitled under the will has to recover it from them. That is not an impossible position, but it is a litigation rather than an administration, and it puts two people on opposite sides who were both named by the same person.
The worst version is the one where both were meant kindly. A nominee who has been told for years that they are provided for, and a beneficiary under a later will who has been told the same thing. Neither is behaving badly, and the conflict was created with a pen.
Where a family wants to resolve such a thing among themselves rather than through a court, a family settlement deed is usually the cheaper and faster instrument, and it is worth looking at before anybody files anything.
Having dealt with what a nomination means, the rest of the practical trouble on this subject is about whether a nomination exists at all.
It is not made by deciding. It is not made by telling your family. It is not made by telling an agent, and it is not made by writing it in a diary with your policy papers. None of those is a nomination, and all four are regularly believed to be one.
A nomination exists when the insurer has it on record and nowhere else. Everything short of that is an intention, and an intention is not a document.
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The requirement is in the section itself, and it is unusually specific about mechanism.
Sub-section (2) requires that a nomination, unless it is incorporated in the text of the policy itself, be made by an endorsement on the policy communicated to the insurer and registered by him in the records relating to the policy.
Three steps, and the third is the one that matters. Made, communicated, registered. A nomination sitting in a form in a drawer has completed the first. One posted and never acknowledged has completed the second.
This is also why a policy document printed years ago is not evidence of the current position. It shows the nomination as at printing. What the insurer holds today is what operates, and the two part company the moment a change is filed.
A small point that removes a common anxiety.
The power to nominate is exercisable at the time of effecting the policy or at any time before it matures for payment. So a policy bought years ago without a nomination, or with one that has become wrong, is not a closed matter. It can be dealt with today.
People assume otherwise surprisingly often, usually because the original form felt like a one-time event. It was not; it was the first exercise of a power that remains available.
And the change itself is not difficult, which is worth knowing because the perceived difficulty is what prevents it.
A change of nomination is made by a notice in writing to the insurer, in the form the insurer requires, and it operates once the insurer registers it. There is no limit on how many times it may be done, and no requirement to explain why.
No reason has to be given, and that is a useful fact. People put off changing a nomination because they imagine having to justify removing somebody. Nobody asks. It is an administrative notice, not an application.
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Writing is not a formality here, and the reason becomes clear only when you consider when the document is used.
Every other arrangement in a household can be confirmed by asking the person who made it. This one cannot, because it is read after they have died. So there is nobody to say what was intended, and the only evidence of the intention is the record.
Which is why an oral instruction to an agent, however clearly given and however honestly remembered, has no operative effect. Not because agents are unreliable, but because the mechanism the section builds is a record held by the insurer, and nothing else counts as the nomination.
So the document to hold on to is not the one you signed.
A copy of the change form you submitted proves that you submitted something. The acknowledgement from the insurer confirming that the nomination has been registered proves that it took effect. Those are different documents proving different things, and families routinely keep the first and not the second.
So the file should hold three things per policy. The policy document, the acknowledgement of the current nomination, and a note of the date it was registered. Three items, one envelope, and the whole problem this page describes largely disappears.
And where the policy document has itself gone missing, duplicate policy assistance is the step that has to come before any of this can even be looked at.
One feature of the section explains most of the hard cases, and it is best understood from the insurer’s side.
Where an insurer pays in good faith to the nominee shown in the policy or in its records, it is discharged. It has no duty to investigate the family, no duty to ask whether circumstances have changed, and no duty to look for a will.
Which has a consequence worth sitting with. An out-of-date nomination is not corrected by anybody explaining the position after the death. The payment is already made, correctly, and the argument that follows is between relatives rather than with the company.
That is the whole practical case for keeping the record current. Not that the insurer might get it wrong, but that it will get it exactly right according to a paper nobody has looked at for fifteen years.
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So the first action on this subject is not drafting. It is finding out.
Ask each insurer, in writing, who is recorded as nominee on each policy, in what share, and with what appointee where one applies. It costs nothing, it is your own information, and you are entitled to it.
Then compare the answer with what you believed. The gap between the two is the entire subject of the rest of this page, and most people are surprised by at least one line.
Do it from the records rather than from the policy folder. The folder tells you what was true when the documents were printed. The records tell you what is true now, and only one of those will be acted on.
Here is the structural reason this document fails so reliably, and it has nothing to do with the law.
A nomination is filled in once, at the moment of purchase, as one field among thirty, usually by somebody who is concentrating on the premium and the cover. And then nothing in life ever prompts anybody to look at it again.
Every other arrangement in a household gets revisited because something forces it. A policy renewal demands a payment. A bank asks you to update your details. A tenancy ends. The nomination has no renewal, no expiry, no annual notice, and no event that brings it to anybody’s attention.
So it does not go stale through carelessness. It goes stale because nothing in the system is designed to ask about it again — and the one event that finally does is the event at which it can no longer be changed.
The commonest stale nomination in the country, and the most understandable.
A policy bought in the early twenties names a parent, which was the right answer then. A marriage happens. Nothing about the marriage touches the policy, and the parent remains the nominee — often for decades, sometimes until the parent has themselves died.
Nobody is at fault. The wedding is a large event with a long list, and nothing on the list says insurance nominations. The policy carries on quietly describing a household that no longer exists.
Which is why we suggest attaching this to an event rather than to a resolution. The week after a marriage, alongside the bank details and the address change, is the natural moment — and it is five minutes.
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The second commonest, and the one with the sharpest consequence.
Where the nominee has died before the policyholder, the nomination has nothing to operate on. If no nominee survives the person whose life is insured, the money goes to the policyholder, or to his heirs or legal representatives, or to the holder of a succession certificate — which is precisely the slow route the nomination existed to avoid.
So a death in the family is not only a loss; it is an event that may have quietly switched off a working arrangement on two or three policies. Nobody thinks about it at the time, and there is no reason they would.
The fix is a fresh nomination, and it should be done in the months afterwards rather than the years. Where this has already happened and a claim is now in question, death claim documentation is the page for that situation rather than this one.
Handled carefully, because this is a subject people find difficult to raise and the law has no delicacy about it at all.
A separation, a judicial separation or a divorce does not alter a nomination. A former spouse named years earlier remains the nominee on the record, and if the insurer is called upon to pay, it pays on what it holds.
That is not the law taking a view about anybody’s marriage. It is the mechanical consequence of a record-based system: the record changes when somebody changes it.
We mention it because it belongs on the list of things to do, and it is almost never on that list. Property, accounts and names get attended to. Nominations across old policies very often do not, and the omission can sit for years.
A quieter one, and it affects almost every parent who nominated a child.
A nomination of a minor is accompanied by an appointee, an adult who is to receive on the child’s behalf during minority. The child then turns eighteen. Nothing happens to the record.
The appointee entry stays on the policy, describing an arrangement with no remaining purpose, and only a fresh filing clears it away. This is rarely a disaster, but it puts a surplus person into a claim at exactly the point where fewer moving parts are worth most.
Which gives the household a natural prompt that costs nothing: when a nominated child turns eighteen, the nomination gets a five-minute look. One event, one check.
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Nominating a child is entirely ordinary and it is what most parents want. It simply has a second step.
A minor cannot give a valid discharge to an insurer. So the nomination has to be accompanied by the naming of an adult who will receive the money on the child’s behalf while the child is still a minor.
That adult is not being given the money. They are receiving it for the child, which is a position of some responsibility and ought to be chosen as such rather than filled in with whoever is standing nearby.
And this is the single most frequent defect we find when we audit a household’s policies.
A minor child named as nominee, and no appointee named at all. The form had a field for it, the field was left blank, and nothing in the process objected.
The effect is discovered at the worst moment. There is a nominee who cannot be paid and nobody authorised to receive on their behalf, so a claim that was meant to be a form and a certificate becomes an exercise in establishing who may collect for the child.
Where guardianship of a minor’s affairs has itself become the question, that is a separate matter and our guardianship certificate work covers it — but it is an expensive way to solve a blank field.
More than one nominee is permitted, and it is frequently the sensible choice. It comes with one obligation that is routinely ignored.
State the shares. In figures, on the form, per nominee.
Where several people are named and no shares are stated, the family is left to work out a division that the policyholder could have settled in ten seconds. And they have to do it at a moment when nobody is in a condition to negotiate and everybody has a slightly different memory of what was said.
Unstated shares are the commonest argument inside an otherwise perfectly correct nomination. The names are right, the registration is in order, the insurer is ready to pay, and the only missing element is two numbers.
Finally, the position where nothing has been named, which is more common than people assume on older policies.
The insurer then has nobody it is authorised to pay. Entitlement has to be established before anything is released, which in practice can mean a succession certificate and a court, and which takes months rather than weeks.
That is the cost a nomination exists to avoid, and it falls on the family at the point of greatest difficulty. A page that spends ten sections explaining the limits of a nomination should also say plainly that having none is worse than having an imperfect one.
So the order of priority is clear. First, have a nomination at all. Second, have it current. Third — and this is the part that actually distributes — have a will. The first two are an afternoon. The third is the real work.
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Enquiries about a nomination reach us at three very different moments, and only one of them is the good one.
The first, and the smallest group by far, are people doing it deliberately: a policy being bought, or an existing one being tidied up, by somebody who has worked out that the nomination is a decision rather than a field. These are easy files and the advice is worth the most, because nothing has gone wrong.
The second have had something change — a marriage, a birth, a death, a separation — and have realised, usually while doing something else entirely, that the policies still name whoever was named years ago. Putting that right is quick and cheap, and it is the best moment at which to arrive.
The third are a family after a death, discovering that the nomination on the policy and the people the law treats as entitled are not the same set. Nothing on this page helps them, and we say so and point them where they should go.
Four questions, and the order matters because each one narrows the next.
What the policy records say now, as opposed to what you remember instructing. Who is in the household today, as against who was there when the policy was bought. Whether the person you want to name falls within the close-family list, because that single fact changes what the nomination does. And whether a will exists, and whether it says anything that the nomination contradicts.
The first question is the one people skip. Almost everybody can tell us who they intended to nominate. Far fewer can tell us what is registered against the policy, and only the second of those is operative.
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This is the piece of work we would recommend to almost anybody reading this page, whether or not they engage anybody to do it.
Take every policy you hold — life, and anything else with a nomination facility — and establish, from the insurer’s own records rather than from memory, who is named on each, in what share, and with what appointee where a minor is involved. Then look at the list as a whole.
Almost nobody has done this. The policies were bought at different times, by a different version of the household, usually through different people, and the nominations were filled in separately with no view of the whole. The list, seen together for the first time, is frequently not the arrangement anybody would choose today.
It is a once-in-a-lifetime job that takes an afternoon. After that it is a five-minute check whenever the household changes, and the five minutes only works because somebody once did the afternoon.
What this work consists of, kept deliberately plain because there is no complexity to sell here.
Establishing from the records what each policy currently carries. Preparing the nomination or the change of nomination in the form the insurer requires, with the relationship stated correctly. Preparing the appointee portion where a nominee is a minor. Handling shares where there is more than one nominee, so that they are stated rather than left to be inferred. Submitting it and chasing the acknowledgement until the registration is confirmed in writing. And producing a one-page record of the whole set for you to keep.
The last item is the one clients come back and thank us for, and it is the cheapest part of the file.
There is one part of this that we refuse, and it gets offered to us more often than anything else on the file.
We will not tell you whom to nominate. The request comes directly sometimes, and sometimes as a family situation narrated in enough detail that a view is clearly being invited. Whom to name is a judgement about your own household and your own intentions, and it is not available to anybody standing outside them.
Our part is to see that the choice is made with the facts in hand: whether the person you name takes beneficially or merely collects, what the law then does with the money, and that the instrument for anything a nomination form has no room for is a will. The choice itself stays where it belongs.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
This page has argued throughout that a nomination is not a plan. It is only fair to say where the plan goes.
A will is the instrument that says who gets what, and it is the one document that can carry an intention a nomination form has no field for — shares that are not equal, a condition, a person left out deliberately, an executor. Our will drafting work covers it, and probate covers what happens to a will afterwards.
Where a family wants to settle an arrangement among themselves rather than leave it to be worked out, a family settlement deed is a different and sometimes better instrument. And where somebody has already died without any of this in place, succession certificate and legal heir certificate are the routes that then have to be taken.
We mention all four because the honest answer to “is my nomination enough?” is usually no, and a page that stopped at the nomination form would be leaving out the part that actually matters.
The line between documentation and legal work sits in a clear place on this subject, and it is worth stating rather than leaving to be discovered.
Preparing a nomination, getting it registered, keeping the record — that is documentation, and it is what we do. Advising on who is entitled under your personal law, on how a particular nomination would interact with a particular will, or on any dispute that has already started between people who each think they are entitled — that is legal advice and we do not give it.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it. If all you want for now is one conversation before committing to anything, our online legal consultation and video consultation are built for that — they are a starting point, not a way of avoiding an advocate.
Listed without hedging, since on a subject the courts have not finished with, reassurance would be the dishonest product to sell.
That a nomination secures anything for the person named. That naming a close relative puts the matter beyond argument — the courts have not read that provision uniformly, and we will not pretend otherwise. That a nomination substitutes for a will. That any insurer will accept a particular form without query. Or that a period we state covers anything beyond our own side of the work.
There is also a sentence you will never hear from us. That a nomination being cheap and quick makes it the finished job. It is the cheap, quick half of something whose other half is a will, and no amount of care with the first half supplies the second.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
A practical point that defeats more families than any legal question on this page.
The person who knows which policies exist, where the documents are and who is named on them is, in most households, exactly one person — and it is the person whose death triggers the need to know. Everybody else starts from nothing, at the worst possible week, often without knowing that a policy exists at all.
So the nomination is only half the job. The other half is a single page, kept where somebody else can reach it, listing what exists and with whom. Not account numbers, not amounts — just insurer, policy number, and who is named.
If you would sooner this was held somewhere organised than at home, that is what our legal file management work is for — though an envelope everybody knows about does the job equally well.
One figure, and it is a small one. Better that you see it than ask for it.
₹699, with our part of it usually taking 2 – 7 days.
Within it: establishing what the records currently carry, the nomination or change prepared in the insurer’s own form, the relationship and shares stated properly, the appointee portion where a minor is named, submission, the acknowledgement chased until registration is confirmed, and the one-page record of the whole set.
Given its own heading so that it gets read instead of skimmed.
Outside it: any charge the insurer levies, which is theirs; a will, which is separate work on a different footing and our will drafting page sets out what it involves; any advice on entitlement under your personal law; notarisation or attestation where a particular insurer requires it, which our notary attestation work covers; and anything that arises after a death, which is death claim documentation rather than this.
On the span: two to seven days describes our side. It does not describe how long a particular insurer takes to register a change and issue the acknowledgement, which is the part of the clock we chase and do not control.
Worth saying plainly, because the economics of this document are strange and they are what makes it get neglected.
It costs almost nothing to put right. It takes an afternoon to audit and minutes to change. Nobody charges much for it because there is little to charge for. And it sits on an asset that is frequently among the largest a household holds.
Every other paper of comparable consequence costs real money and real time, which is why it gets attention. This one costs neither, which is exactly why it does not.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Of everything above, the item to act on this week costs you nothing and involves nobody.
Find the policies. Not from memory — from the documents, or from the insurer. For each one, write down who is named, in what share, and whether that person is your parent, spouse or child. Then read the list back as though you were somebody else looking at your household.
Most people discover one of three things: a name that should have changed years ago, a share that was never specified, or a minor named with no appointee. All three are an afternoon’s correction now and a genuine problem later.
And when the audit is done, write the page down rather than carrying it in your head.
Insurer, policy number, who is named, in what share, and the date the nomination was last registered. Five columns. One sheet. Kept with your other papers and known to one other adult.
Why the date column earns its place. It is the only thing on the sheet that tells you, at a glance years later, whether the arrangement belongs to the household you have now or to the one you had then.
A short closing reality, because it reframes everything above.
At the moment this document is used, you are not there. Nobody can ask you what you meant, which insurer you dealt with, or why a particular name is on a particular policy. Whatever is written down is the entire record of your intention, and whatever is not written down does not exist.
That is the real argument for the audit and for the sheet. Not that the law is complicated — it is, in parts, and the parts that are unsettled will be argued out by courts over years. But a family does not usually lose on the unsettled law. It loses because nobody knew what existed.
A nomination is also asset by asset, and the one you have made here reaches nothing else. Shareholdings carry their own form, lodged separately with each company’s registrar, and a demat account carries another with the depository participant. Our guide to nomination and transmission of shares covers those, including what the regulator now says a nominee actually holds.
All of the above collapses into one statement, made by the Supreme Court in 1983 and not departed from since.
A nomination names the hand authorised to receive. For a parent, a spouse or a child it may now do more than that, and how much more is still being worked out. For everybody else it does exactly that and nothing beyond it.
So the question to ask of your nomination is not whether somebody is named. It is whether being named gives that person what you actually intend them to have — and if it does not, the document that does is a will.
Being the person an insurer or a bank may pay settles nothing about who is entitled to keep the proceeds, and the instrument that decides who may collect a deceased person deposits and securities is a different one altogether. See our succession certificate page for what that instrument covers and how it is obtained.
A nomination is not a third way of passing property on. The Supreme Court settled that in 1983 in Sarbati Devi v. Usha Devi: a nomination under section 39 of the Insurance Act, 1938 does not confer any beneficial interest on the nominee, it only indicates the hand authorised to receive the amount, and the money is claimed by the heirs under the law of succession that applies. The 2015 amendment changed part of that, for a closed list of close relatives only — parents, spouse, children, or some combination — and even there the High Courts have not read the provision uniformly. So the work is small and the order of it matters: establish what the insurer actually has registered rather than what you remember instructing, check whether the person named falls inside that close-family list or outside it, state shares and the appointee for a minor instead of leaving them to be inferred, get the change registered and the acknowledgement in hand, and keep a one-page record of the whole set where another adult can reach it. What we do not do: tell you whom to nominate, advise on entitlement under your personal law, or let anybody leave believing a nomination form is a substitute for a will.
The two decisions and the one section this page rests on — and what is still open. The section is 39 of the Insurance Act, 1938: sub-section (1) for the power to nominate, (2) for the form and for registration in the insurer’s records, (5) and (6) for what happens where nominees do or do not survive, (7) for the close-family nominees who are beneficially entitled, (8) for a nominee of that class who dies after the insured but before payment, and (9) preserving creditors’ rights. The first decision is Smt. Sarbati Devi v. Smt. Usha Devi, 1984 AIR 346, (1984) 1 SCC 424, where the Supreme Court held that a nomination does not have the effect of conferring on the nominee any beneficial interest and only indicates the hand which is authorised to receive the amount, the money remaining claimable by the heirs under the law of succession governing the assured. The second is Shakti Yezdani v. Jayanand Jayant Salgaonkar (2023), where the Court refused to read a nomination as giving absolute title, treated the asset as vesting in the nominee for a limited administrative purpose, and summed the position up in five words — no third mode of succession. Our will drafting page quotes that judgment at proper length and is the better place to read it. We also note that the case concerned shares and depository nominations rather than insurance, instead of borrowing more from it than it holds. And the open part, stated because you are entitled to know it: High Courts have not read sub-section (7) the same way, some treating a close-family nominee as entitled absent contrary intention and others requiring evidence that ownership was intended, with at least one holding that the question has to be worked out in civil proceedings.
What we have deliberately left out. No insurer’s form number, no charge, no processing period, no view on how any particular personal law divides an estate, and no prediction of how the unsettled point will land. Succession is governed by the personal law that applies to the individual, and a general page that divided estates would be wrong for most of its readers.
Who the other parts of this belong to. Your insurer’s records, for what is actually registered today — that is the only authoritative answer and it is free to ask for. Your advocate, for entitlement under your personal law and for anything already in dispute. Our will drafting page for the instrument that actually distributes, and probate of will for what follows it. Our insurance death claim page for the claim itself; deceased depositor claim where bank accounts rather than policies are the question, which covers the nominee position on the banking side; locker nomination for lockers, which work differently again; and policy assignment where what you actually want is to transfer the policy itself rather than name a receiver.
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