One word on one form causes most of the trouble in this area, and the regulator has now said plainly what it means. SEBI’s own words: a nominee is merely a trustee, limited to collecting the assets of the deceased and transferring it to the legal heir or heirs. The nomination form itself now says the nominee receives the assets as trustee and on behalf of legal heirs. So nomination answers one question and succession answers the other. Who can collect, and who gets to keep. The form only ever asked the first. That is still a reason to nominate, not a reason not to. Collecting is the slow part. With a nomination it takes a short list of documents; without one it can take a court. And the number that decides your paperwork is the threshold: ₹5 lakh per listed entity for physical shares, ₹15 lakh per beneficial owner for demat. At or below it, an indemnity bond with the family’s no-objections can stand in place of a succession certificate. One thing widely believed and not so: a registrar cannot freeze your folio for not updating PAN or a nomination choice. What it can do is stop servicing it, and park your dividend.
When a shareholder dies, two entirely separate things have to happen and almost everybody treats them as one. The holding has to come out of a dead person’s name, and it has to end up with whoever is entitled to it. Those are not the same event, they are not governed by the same body of law, and they do not necessarily involve the same person.
The first is a procedure, run by a company’s registrar or by a depository participant, against a checklist. The second is a question of entitlement, governed by succession law or by a will, and settled between a family or by a court.
Nomination belongs to the first. It is a mechanism for getting the holding out, quickly, into the hands of somebody identified in advance. It was never designed to decide the second, and reading it as though it does is the single most expensive misunderstanding in this subject.
Hold on to this as you read. Every rule below answers one of two questions. Who may collect? and Who gets to keep? When something seems contradictory, it is almost always because an answer to one is being read as an answer to the other.
A nomination is something you do while you are alive. You tell the company, through its registrar, or you tell your depository participant, the name of the person who will be able to come forward after your death and have the holding moved to them.
It is folio-specific and account-specific. It is recorded on a prescribed form. It can be changed as often as you like, and it can be withdrawn. It costs nothing, and the expected processing time is thirty days.
What it produces is speed. When the holder dies, the person named can approach the registrar with a short list of documents and the holding moves. No court, no affidavits from relatives, no waiting for everybody to agree. That is the entire value of it, and it is a considerable value.
It also explains why nomination sits inside transmission rather than beside it. A nomination does not change what happens on death; the holding passes by operation of law either way. What it changes is who the registrar will recognise, and how much proof that recognition needs. The event is the same; the evidence of entitlement is what the nomination simplifies.
Transmission is the word for a holding passing by operation of law rather than by anybody’s act. Death is the usual trigger; insolvency and the appointment of a legal representative are the others that arise.
Nobody signs a transfer. Nobody sells anything. The holding passes because a legal event has occurred, and what the registrar does is recognise that event on its records once it is satisfied the event happened and that the person in front of it is the right person to recognise.
That framing explains the paperwork. Everything the registrar asks for goes to one of those two things: proof of the event, and proof that the claimant is the person the law puts in the holder’s place. A document that proves neither will not help however impressive it looks.
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Two other triggers are worth knowing even though death is the usual one. Where a holder is adjudged insolvent, or where a court appoints somebody to act for a holder who cannot act for themselves, the holding can move by the same mechanism. The documents differ but the logic does not: an event has occurred, and somebody is asking the register to recognise it.
A transfer is a voluntary act between a living transferor and a transferee, on an instrument, with stamp duty on that instrument. A transmission is none of those things.
The practical consequences of the difference are worth setting out, because people arrive expecting the transfer machinery and are confused when it does not apply.
| Transfer | Transmission | |
|---|---|---|
| What causes it | An agreement between two living people | A legal event, usually death |
| Who signs | Both sides, on an instrument of transfer | The claimant alone, on a request |
| Stamp duty on the instrument | Arises | Does not arise in the same way |
| What the registrar is checking | That the instrument is proper and duty is paid | That the event happened and the claimant is entitled |
Our guide to share transfer documentation covers the transfer side in full, including the instrument, the duty and the board’s power to refuse registration. That page and this one are deliberately separate, because almost nothing crosses between them.
Transmission is also, unhelpfully, a word nobody uses outside this field. Families ask how to get the shares transferred, counters hear a word that means something else, and two different procedures get started. If you take one piece of vocabulary from this page, make it this one: the holder has died, so the word is transmission, and saying it at the counter gets you to the right desk.
Ordinary English is the problem. Nominee sounds like beneficiary. If somebody tells you that you have been nominated, your reasonable inference is that you have been given something.
The form does nothing to correct that impression. It asks for a name, it asks for a relationship, and if there are several it asks for a percentage against each. A percentage especially reads like a share of the estate, because in every other context that is what a percentage against a name means.
And the arrangement usually matches, which hides the problem for a generation. People nominate the person they also intend to inherit. The mismatch only appears where the family is complicated, which is exactly when it matters most and when the smallest number of people have thought about it.
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None of which makes nomination pointless, and the rest of this page is partly an argument for doing it. But the form is a key to a door, not a title deed, and the person given the key should be told which of the two it is.
There is no need to reason towards the answer, because the regulator has written it down. SEBI’s published material states that a nominee is merely a trustee, limited to collecting the assets of the deceased and transferring it to the legal heir or heirs.
It goes further, and this is the part worth telling the person you nominate. The nomination form itself now provides that nominees receive the assets as trustee and on behalf of legal heirs. The words are on the document being signed.
Securities and Exchange Board of India, published Frequently Asked Questions. A nominee is described as merely a trustee, limited to collecting the assets of the deceased and transferring it to the legal heir or heirs, with the nomination form providing that nominees receive the assets as trustee and on behalf of legal heir or heirs. SEBI records that position as resting on an order of the Supreme Court dated 14 December 2023, read with SEBI’s own circulars dated 10 January 2025 and 28 February 2025.
This page states the proposition on SEBI’s authority and in SEBI’s words. It does not quote the judgment, because the Court’s own record of it could not be retrieved when this page was written, and we do not reproduce a judgment we have not read in the original.
It leaves them with an asset that has moved and a question that has not been decided. The nominee holds the securities. The heirs are entitled to them. Between those two facts sits whatever the family does next.
Where everybody agrees, nothing further is needed from a registrar, and the family records its arrangement in a document so that it is not re-argued later. Where they do not agree, the dispute is between the nominee and the heirs, and it is decided by a court rather than by the company, which has already done its part and has no view on the matter.
The thing worth noticing is that the company’s act of transmission settles nothing about ownership. Being on the register is not the same as being entitled, and a family that treats the register as the answer has mistaken a record for a decision.
One consequence runs through everything else here. Because the register records holding rather than entitlement, the person who ends up on it inherits a responsibility as much as an asset, and that is as true of a nominee as of anybody else.
A registrar checks documents against a list. It establishes that the holder has died, that the claimant is who the record or the law says may claim, and that the identity documents match. Then it registers the holding in the new name.
What it does not do is adjudicate. It will not decide whether a will is valid, whether a nominee is behaving properly, whether a family arrangement is fair, or who ought to inherit. Nothing in its function permits it to, and asking it to is the reason some files sit for months without a decision.
This cuts both ways, and the second way is the one people miss. Because the registrar does not adjudicate, getting the holding registered in your name is not a finding that you are entitled to it. Somebody who disputes your entitlement is not out of time merely because the transmission went through.
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Identity records are the quiet third item. Every route on this page turns at some point on matching a name against an identity document, and the commonest obstruction is a PAN that does not match the folio or was never recorded against it at all. Putting that right while the holder is alive takes one form; putting it right afterwards takes a declaration, a notary and somebody to swear it.
Almost everything difficult on this page becomes easy if two documents exist before they are needed, and both are cheap.
The first is a nomination against every folio and every demat account, kept current. That decides who collects, and it is the difference between weeks and a court.
The second is a will. That decides who keeps, which the nomination does not. People who have taken trouble over one and not the other have done half the job, and it is usually the half that produces the faster outcome rather than the fairer one.
And one conversation, which costs nothing at all. Tell the person you have nominated that they are the collector, not the owner, and tell the others that a nomination has been made and why. The disputes in this area are almost never about law. They are about somebody discovering an arrangement at the worst possible moment and reading it as a decision that was made against them.
A nomination against a folio is made on Form SH-13. It is a short document and it asks for the obvious things: the folio, the securities, and the person being named, with enough detail to identify them later when somebody has to be matched against an identity document.
Fill it as though a stranger will read it in fifteen years, because that is what will happen. Full name as it appears on identity documents rather than as the family uses it, date of birth, relationship, and an address and contact that will still find them. A nomination in favour of my son Raju is not a nomination anybody can act on.
The commonest defect is not an error on the form at all. It is a form that was filled, signed, and then never sent, or sent and never acknowledged. Until the registrar has recorded it, the nomination does not exist for any practical purpose.
A nomination also lapses in ways people do not expect. If the nominee dies before the holder and nothing is done, the folio is left pointing at somebody who cannot collect, which is the same position as having no nomination at all but with the added confusion of a name on the record. Check the nomination after any death in the family, not only after your own circumstances change.
More than one nominee is permitted. Where there is more than one, SEBI states that the form must clearly mention the names of the nominees and the entitlement percentage against each nominee.
Be careful with the word entitlement in that sentence, because it is doing narrower work than it appears to. It governs how the holding is split between nominees at the point of collection. It does not override succession; the holding each nominee collects is still collected on behalf of the legal heirs.
The trap this sets for families. A parent who writes 50 and 50 against two children believes they have divided the shares between them. They have divided the collection, not the inheritance. If the intention is to divide the asset, that belongs in a will, where it has effect, rather than on a nomination form, where it does not.
Make the percentages add to a hundred, state them in whole numbers, and keep a copy. Ambiguity here is resolved by whoever reads the form afterwards, and they will not have the benefit of knowing what you meant.
Nomination is not a single instruction that attaches to a person. SEBI is explicit that the nomination form, or the opt-out form, has to be provided separately for each folio.
Shares in six companies in physical form therefore means six forms to six registrars, and a nomination lodged with one of them tells the others nothing. It explains why so many families find half a portfolio nominated and half of it not, which is almost never a decision anybody made.
The same logic applies across asset types. A nomination on a demat account does not reach a bank account, an insurance policy or a locker; each has its own framework and its own form. Our pages on insurance nomination and bank locker claims deal with their own, and the honest summary is that there is no single form anywhere that covers everything a person owns.
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A minor can be nominated, and one restriction attaches that catches people out. SEBI states that multiple nominees are not permitted where a nominee is a minor.
So the choice is binary. Either the minor is the sole nominee, or the minor is not nominated at all. A parent who wants to name two adult children and one grandchild has to choose a different arrangement.
There is a practical point behind the rule. A minor cannot give a valid discharge, so somebody has to act on their behalf, and that arrangement is simpler to administer where the minor is the only nominee. Whether nominating a child is wise at all is a separate question and usually the answer is that a will does the job better, because a will can appoint somebody to hold until the child is grown.
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None of these forms carries a fee worth worrying about, and none of them needs a lawyer. The barrier is entirely that nobody thinks about it, which is why this page suggests a date rather than a trigger: look at every nomination you hold once a year, on a date you already remember.
A nomination is not permanent and changing it is deliberately easy. SEBI records that a nomination once made may be modified by submitting a fresh nomination form, and that cancelling one outright is done by submitting Form SH-14 together with the Form ISR-3 declaration for opting out.
Note the asymmetry, because it is useful. Replacing a nominee takes one form. Removing a nominee and having none takes two, because opting out is itself a recorded choice rather than an absence of one.
Events that should send you back to the form. A marriage, yours or the nominee’s.
A death, particularly of the nominee, which leaves a nomination pointing at nobody.
A birth, where the arrangement was made before the family was complete.
An estrangement, which is the one nobody acts on and the one that causes the worst outcomes.
A new will, because the two documents should at least be consistent about who is expected to do what.
An investor who does not want to nominate anybody files Form ISR-3 with the registrar and transfer agent for that folio. It is a declaration that the choice has been made, rather than an omission.
It is worth understanding why the framework insists on a positive opt-out. A blank is ambiguous: it could mean the holder decided against nominating, or that the form never arrived, or that it was lost. A recorded opt-out removes that ambiguity, and in a system where a missing detail restricts service, removing ambiguity is the point.
Opting out is a legitimate choice. If your estate is going to be administered through a will and you would rather nobody be in a position to collect ahead of that process, saying so on the record is cleaner than leaving a gap. What it is not is a way to avoid thinking about the question.
Keeping the acknowledgement matters for a second reason as well. Where a family later disagrees about whether a nomination was changed, the dated acknowledgement is the only neutral evidence of what was lodged and when. Where a file is going to hold documents over decades, how they are stored is its own small discipline, and our legal file management work exists because families lose more to disorganisation than to disputes.
Where the holder signs by thumb impression rather than by wet signature, SEBI states that a witness is required.
This is a small requirement and it stops a surprising number of files, usually for an elderly holder in a family that did not know to arrange it. Learn it in advance and the form goes through; discover it afterwards and the whole set comes back.
The same care is worth taking with a signature that has drifted. A folio opened in 1990 holds a specimen signature from 1990, and the holder’s hand has changed since. Where there is a visible difference, update the specimen while the holder can do it, rather than leaving the family to reconcile it later with declarations.
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SEBI records an expected timeline of thirty days for processing a nomination request. Treat that as the point at which to follow up rather than as a promise.
What matters more than the timeline is what you keep. A nomination you cannot prove you made is a nomination the family will argue about, and the proof is not the form; it is the acknowledgement.
The three things to keep together, in one place somebody can find. A copy of the form as submitted. The acknowledgement or the record of lodgement. And a note of which folio or account it relates to, written in plain words rather than as a number, because a number alone means nothing to whoever opens the file.
Somewhere around the end of 2023 a very large number of Indian investors received messages telling them to nominate or opt out before a date, failing which their accounts would be frozen. The messages came from brokers, from fund houses and from depository participants, and they were not invented.
Enough of them circulated, and enough of them were worded loosely, that the subject is now surrounded by confident and conflicting advice. Some people believe their account is frozen when it is not. Others believe nothing ever happens, which is also not right.
What follows is both strands of what the regulator has published, set out separately. They do not resolve into a single sentence, and a page that pretends they do would be making one up.
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Both of those statements come from SEBI, which is why this page sets them side by side rather than choosing between them.
SEBI’s investor portal records that the earlier date of 31 December 2023 for providing a nomination or an opt-out for mutual fund folios and demat accounts was extended to 30 June 2024, and it describes folios and accounts without either as frozen under that extended deadline.
It separately records that the choice of nomination for trading accounts is voluntary, which is a useful distinction on its own: a trading account and a demat account are different things and people routinely treat them as one.
It is a short statement and it is worth quoting to anybody who tells you otherwise. The portal page is describing a deadline and its consequence; the FAQ is describing what one class of intermediary is permitted to do. Those can sit in the same framework without either being wrong.
SEBI’s published Frequently Asked Questions put it differently. They state that registrars and transfer agents cannot freeze the folios of an investor in case of non-updation of PAN or of the choice of nomination.
That is not a softer version of the same thing. It is a statement that a particular consequence is not available to a particular class of intermediary.
It is also worth noticing what neither statement says. Neither describes anybody confiscating anything, and neither puts a holding at risk of being lost for want of a nomination. The consequences in play are about service and access, not ownership, and a reader who has been told otherwise has been told something nobody published.
What it does not say is that nothing follows from an un-updated folio. Something does, and the next few sections set it out, because the consequences that are clearly stated turn out to matter more in practice than the one everybody argues about.
The distinction the two statements appear to turn on is which intermediary holds what. A physical folio sits with a company’s registrar and transfer agent. A demat account sits with a depository participant. A mutual fund folio sits with the fund’s own registrar. They operate under different parts of the framework, and a restriction imposed on one is not automatically imposed on the others.
That reading fits both statements without straining either. It is also, deliberately, as far as this page will go. We are setting out two published positions and the distinction that appears to reconcile them; we are not announcing a rule that neither source states.
What to do instead of choosing between them. Ask the intermediary that holds your own asset, in writing, whether a nomination or opt-out is recorded and what the consequence of not having one is for that account. One email to your depository participant and one to each registrar, and you have an answer specific to you rather than an inference from a page.
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Whatever the position on freezing, there is a clearly stated consequence that is worth knowing because it is already affecting people. SEBI records that grievances and service requests on a folio lacking the specified details are taken up only once those details are furnished.
Read that carefully and the sting becomes obvious. The folio is not frozen, so nothing dramatic announces itself. But the mechanism by which you would ask for anything, including fixing the folio, is restricted until you fix the folio. People discover this at the moment they need something, which is usually after a death.
There is a second effect that only shows up later. A folio that cannot be serviced is also a folio whose details cannot easily be corrected by a family after the holder has died, because the same restriction meets them. The work gets harder at exactly the point when somebody finally attempts it.
For a folio lacking PAN, contact details, bank details or specimen signature, SEBI records that payment is made only through electronic mode with effect from 1 April 2024.
The practical effect falls hardest on exactly the holders least likely to notice: older investors holding in physical form, with no bank mandate on the folio and an address that has not been updated in two decades. The cheque that used to arrive does not arrive, and nothing explains why.
Which is why the bank mandate deserves its own line on the checklist. Electronic payment needs an account on the record; an account closed years ago is as good as none. Confirm the bank details against a current account rather than against what you believe is on file.
It also tells you where to look if a dividend you expected never arrived. Before assuming an error at the company, check whether the folio is missing one of the four details, because that is the likeliest explanation and it is one you can fix yourself.
Where a folio is deficient in that way, SEBI records that unpaid dividends are held in the Unpaid Dividend Account until the details are updated. The money has not vanished and it has not been forfeited. It is parked, waiting for a form.
This is the single most persuasive argument we can offer for updating a folio, because it is the one with money attached. Families routinely find several years of dividends sitting against a folio that was missing a bank mandate, and the work to release them is ordinary paperwork rather than anything legal.
It is also time-sensitive in a way the parked money is not. What sits in that account does not sit there indefinitely; where nothing is claimed for long enough a further mechanism takes over, and the later part of this page takes that up. The short version is that fixing a folio gets cheaper the earlier it is done.
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Yes, and the reason has nothing to do with whether anybody can freeze anything.
Nominate because the alternative, for your family, is the route described in the second half of this page: a threshold, an affidavit from every legal heir, a no-objection from everybody who is not claiming, and in the larger cases a court. Nominating converts that into a short list of documents filed by one person.
And nominate even though the nominee will hold as a trustee. A trustee who can collect in three weeks is worth a great deal more to a family than an heir who is undoubtedly entitled and cannot get at the asset for a year.
And if the honest answer to the first two is that you do not know, that is the useful finding rather than a failure. Most people do not know. The list exists to turn a vague worry into four emails.
Not a plan, not a consultation. A list, which you can make in an evening.
Every demat account you hold, with the participant’s name and whether a nomination is recorded.
Every physical folio, with the company, the registrar and whether a nomination is recorded.
Whether the PAN, bank details, address and specimen signature on each are current.
Who is named, and whether that is still the person you would choose today.
Where the papers are, written down somewhere a family member would find it.
That final line gets skipped more than any other, and it does the most harm. A perfectly nominated holding that nobody knows exists is, for practical purposes, a holding that does not exist, and it is how shares end up unclaimed for years in a family that would have claimed them immediately.
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Keep the acknowledgement of the lodgement, and diarise a follow-up rather than waiting to be contacted. Transmission files do not usually fail; they stall, and a stalled file that nobody chases stays stalled.
Where the sole holder, or all the joint holders, have died and a nomination is recorded, the nominee approaches the registrar or the depository participant. This is the shortest route in this subject and the documents reflect that.
Nothing on the list requires another family member. Nothing requires a court. That is the whole design, and it is why the nomination form is worth the twenty minutes it takes.
What the nominee receives is the holding, registered in their name. What the nominee takes on, at the same moment and whether or not anybody mentions it, is the obligation that goes with being a trustee.
The route is the same in substance for a dematerialised holding, with the depository participant in place of the registrar and the account credit in place of a certificate. Ask the participant for its own transmission form rather than assuming the physical set will do, because the two are not interchangeable even though they ask for the same things.
| Document | Point of it |
|---|---|
| A duly signed transmission request form, with KYC details and documents | The request itself, and the identification of the person making it |
| The original death certificate, or a copy attested by the nominee | Proof of the event that causes the transmission |
| The nominee’s PAN card | Identification, and the tax record the new holding will attach to |
| The original securities certificate | Surrendered so that the holding can be reissued or credited |
Four items. Compare that with the list further down this page for a holding with no nomination above the threshold, and the case for spending twenty minutes on Form SH-13 makes itself.
The last line of that list, the original securities certificate, is the one that stops files. Old certificates get lost, and a holding cannot be reissued against a certificate nobody can produce. Where that has happened the procedure for a lost certificate runs alongside the transmission rather than after it, and starting both together saves a cycle.
One detail in that list is easy to pass over and genuinely useful: the death certificate may be the original or a copy attested by the nominee.
That is a real concession. It means the nominee does not have to surrender an original to every institution holding something in the name, which matters when there are six of them and each wants one. It also means the attestation is the nominee’s own act, carrying their responsibility for it.
Even so, ask the issuing authority for a batch of certified copies at the very beginning. Institutions differ in what they accept, an attested copy will not satisfy all of them, and a death certificate obtained in a batch costs almost nothing while a second trip costs a fortnight. Where the certificate itself carries an error, correct it before circulating it, because the same error then has to be explained to everybody; putting that right is a job on its own, and our death certificate correction page deals with it.
The nominee gets the holding in their name, with every incident of holding it: dividends are paid to them, corporate actions reach them, and they can deal with the securities because the register says they may.
What the nominee owes is the other half, and it is owed from the first day. On SEBI’s own statement the nominee collects and transfers to the legal heirs. The holding is in their name; the benefit is not theirs merely because the register says so.
What a nominee should therefore not do. Sell and spend. Treat dividends received as income of their own. Allow the holding to be mixed with their own so that nobody can later tell which is which. Each of those makes an eventual accounting harder, and each of them is done innocently by people who were told they had been given something.
The advice we give a nominee is unglamorous and it works. Keep the holding identifiable. Keep a record of everything received on it. And raise the subject with the family early rather than waiting to be asked, because a nominee who volunteers an account is in a wholly different position from one who produces it after a demand.
If the nominee is a trustee, there has to be a second step: getting the securities from the nominee to the people entitled to them. For a long time that second step had no settled machinery, which is why so many families stopped at the first one and left the holding sitting in the nominee’s name indefinitely.
Doing nothing is worse than it looks. The holding stays in a name that is not the owner’s, and every year that passes makes the eventual accounting harder: dividends have been received, shares may have split, a bonus may have been issued, and the nominee’s own estate now contains something that was never theirs. When the nominee in turn dies, the problem is inherited by people who know nothing about it.
Where the family agrees, the second step is ordinary documentation: an arrangement recorded in writing, and a transfer giving effect to it. Where it does not agree, it is a dispute. Either way it is a step, and the useful instruction is to take it within months rather than leaving it for years.
There is one more reason not to leave the holding sitting in the nominee name. Everything else in the estate will have moved on: bank accounts closed, policies claimed, property mutated. A single asset left in an intermediate state is the one that resurfaces a decade later, usually when somebody is trying to sell something else. Our estate distribution work treats the whole set together for exactly that reason.
SEBI has addressed this second step directly. On 19 September 2025 it issued a circular numbered SEBI/HO/MIRSD/MIRSD-PoD/P/CIR/2025/130, titled Ease of doing investment — Smooth transmission of securities from Nominee to Legal Heir.
We are naming it and going no further, and the reason belongs on the page. The circular’s own text could not be retrieved when this page was written, and we are not willing to tell you what a circular says on the strength of its title or of somebody else’s summary of it.
What the title does tell you, and it is worth something. That the regulator has treated nominee-to-heir transmission as a distinct process needing its own easing, which is itself confirmation that it is a real second step rather than something families imagine. Before relying on any description of what it requires, including ours, read the circular on sebi.gov.in or ask your depository participant for the current procedure.
SEBI separately issued a circular dated 10 January 2025, numbered SEBI/HO/OIAE/OIAE_IAD-3/P/ON/2025/01650 and titled Circular on Revise and Revamp Nomination Facilities in the Indian Securities Market. The same applies: named here, contents not described.
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In most families they are, and in that case the distinction on this page never surfaces. A sole surviving spouse who is both the nominee and the only person entitled collects as trustee for herself, which is a sentence that describes nothing happening.
Even then one step is worth taking. Record, briefly and in writing, that the other potential claimants have no objection, or that there are none. It costs an afternoon and it protects against a claim surfacing years later from a relative nobody thought about, at which point the records will be cold and the witnesses older.
Where there are others who are entitled but not claiming, a relinquishment deed turns an understanding into a document. The difference matters most to whoever has to deal with it after everybody in the room today is gone.
What makes it workable is that both of them are true at once, and saying both is what keeps the peace. The nominee did collect lawfully, and the siblings are entitled. Neither of those is an accusation against the other.
This is the case the rest of this page is really about. A father nominates his eldest son because the son lives in the same city and handles things. The father has three children. The son collects, and the question of what he does next is live from the first day.
Handled early it is simple. The son tells his siblings what he holds and what it is worth, the three of them settle how it is to be divided, and that is recorded in a family settlement deed which the transfers then follow. Our estate distribution documentation work runs that process across every asset at once, which is almost always faster than doing it asset by asset.
Handled late it is a lawsuit. And the thing that turns the first into the second is almost never greed; it is silence. A sibling who hears nothing for two years concludes something, and by the time the conversation happens the positions have hardened.
The one instruction worth taking from this section. If you are the nominee, write to the others within the first month. Say what the holding is, say that you hold it as the person able to collect rather than as the owner, and ask how they want it dealt with. That letter prevents more litigation in this field than any document we draft.
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Now the other half: there is no nomination, there is no surviving joint holder, and the holder has died. This is where families spend months, and it is entirely avoidable by the person who is no longer around to avoid it.
What governs here is a threshold. The documents a registrar will require depend on how much the holding is worth and on whether it is held physically or in dematerialised form. Get the threshold question right and the file may need no court at all. Get it wrong and a family starts a two-year proceeding it never needed.
Before any of that, somebody has to establish who the legal heirs actually are, and that is its own document rather than an assumption. A legal heir certificate is issued by the local revenue authority and is not the same thing as a succession certificate from a court; it identifies the family, it does not decide entitlement to a particular asset. Several registrars will ask for one, and a family that obtains it early saves a round.
This is the most practically valuable thing on the page and the thing least often mentioned at a counter. SEBI’s published material sets out a threshold which decides which set of documents applies, and below it a notarised indemnity bond can stand in place of a court document.
Securities held in physical form: rupees five lakh per listed entity.
Securities held in dematerialised form: rupees fifteen lakh per beneficial owner.
Where the value is at or below the applicable threshold and no succession certificate or probate exists, a notarised indemnity bond may be submitted together with either no-objection certificates from all the legal heirs or an attested family settlement deed. Where it is above, the fuller set applies: Form ISR-5 from the legal heirs, the original share certificate, the death certificate, PAN with proof of address, a notarised affidavit from all the legal heirs, a no-objection from all non-claimants, and a succession certificate, probate or equivalent document, with further requirements where only a will or a legal heirship certificate is produced.
Establish the value from the statement and the market price rather than from an impression, and write it down with the date you worked it out. The threshold question will be asked again by every registrar, and an answer you can show the working for is worth more than a figure you remember.
Two figures, and the words after each matter as much as the figure itself.
Per listed entity means each company is looked at on its own. A family holding three lakh in each of four companies is below the threshold four times over, not above it once. This is the single most useful consequence of the wording and it is routinely missed, including by people who should know.
Per beneficial owner is the demat equivalent and it works differently, being tied to the account holder rather than to each company inside the account. So a demat account is assessed as a whole, and a physical holding company by company.
Which means the arithmetic is worth doing properly before anybody mentions a court. Work out the value of each physical holding separately, and the demat account as one figure. A family told flatly that they need a succession certificate has very often not had that sum done for them, because the person who said it was describing the hardest case rather than theirs.
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It is also the route where honesty pays twice. A registrar accepting a bond and NOCs is relying on the family having told it who the heirs are. A file assembled carelessly here will usually pass, and the cost of that comes later, to the family rather than to anybody else.
Here the court document becomes optional, and in its place come two things: a notarised indemnity bond, and either no-objection certificates from all the legal heirs or an attested family settlement deed.
Read the alternatives carefully, because they are doing the same job in two different ways. NOCs are each heir saying separately that they do not object. A settlement deed is all of them agreeing together on what happens. The first is easier to obtain from people scattered across cities; the second settles more and is worth the extra effort where the family is in one place and willing.
Either way, every legal heir has to be identified and dealt with. There is no version of this route that works by leaving somebody out, and a family that tries will usually succeed at the counter and fail later, when the person left out appears.
An indemnity bond is a promise to make good any loss the company or the registrar suffers if it turns out the holding was given to the wrong person. It is not a formality, and the family member who signs it should be told what they are signing.
It is also the mechanism that makes the simplified route possible. The registrar is being asked to act without a court’s confirmation of who is entitled, and it manages that risk by taking a promise from the person asking. That is a reasonable bargain and it saves families a great deal, provided the person giving the promise understands it.
When we will not prepare one. If we have been told that somebody disputes the claim, or that an heir has not been informed, the bond is not a formality but an undertaking to cover a loss that is foreseeable. We say so and decline. We are not being squeamish. Of everything described here, this is the one document capable of leaving a client worse off than if they had done nothing at all.
A no-objection certificate from a legal heir says only that the person does not object to the holding being released to the claimant. It is narrow by design and it does not, by itself, give up anybody’s entitlement.
A family settlement deed does more. It records what the family has agreed about who takes what, and because it covers more than one asset it can resolve the whole estate rather than the shares alone. Where a family is going to have the conversation anyway, having it once and recording it properly is better value than four separate sets of NOCs.
Whichever is used, two practical points decide whether it works. Everybody has to be in it, including the relative abroad, which means allowing time. And the names on it have to match the names on the other documents, which is where files go back more often than for any substantive reason.
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Where an heir cannot be traced at all, a public notice inviting claims is sometimes the way through, and a legal heir claim public notice is a recognised step rather than an improvisation. It does not replace a court document where one is required, but it establishes that an effort was made and it can satisfy a registrar that the family is not simply ignoring somebody inconvenient.
Above the threshold the full set applies, and setting it out in one block makes the case for nomination better than any argument could.
| What is required | Who has to be involved |
|---|---|
| Form ISR-5 from the legal heirs | The claimants |
| The original share certificate | Whoever holds the papers |
| The death certificate | The issuing authority, at the outset |
| PAN with proof of address | Each claimant |
| A notarised affidavit from all the legal heirs | Every legal heir, and a notary |
| A no-objection from all non-claimants | Everybody entitled who is not claiming |
| A succession certificate, probate or equivalent | A court |
Three of those seven need people other than the claimant, and one needs a court. That is the difference a nomination form would have made, and it is why this page spends its first half on a document that takes twenty minutes.
Nothing on that list is instant. Each involves a petition, a notice period and a hearing, and the time it takes depends on the court rather than on how well the papers are prepared. That is the real reason the threshold question is worth settling first: not because court documents are expensive, though they are, but because they are slow in a way nobody can shorten.
Three court documents get used interchangeably in conversation and they are not interchangeable. Knowing which one your situation points at prevents a family from petitioning for the wrong thing.
A succession certificate is directed at debts and securities, and it is the one most often relevant where there is no will.
Probate is the court’s certification of a will and of the executor named in it. It presupposes a will.
Letters of administration are granted where the estate needs administering and nobody named is in a position to do it, whether or not there is a will.
Which one fits depends on whether there is a will, what it says, who is named in it and what is being claimed. That is a question for a lawyer on your facts, and it is the first question to settle, because each has a different petition, a different timeline and a different cost.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it
A registered will is not the same as a proved one, and the distinction trips people up in both directions. Registration is done in the testator lifetime and makes the document harder to dispute; probate is a grant made after death. Our will registration page covers the first and probate is dealt with on its own page. Doing the first is cheap and sensible; it does not remove the need for the second where the second is mandatory.
And a point about the documents at the top of the list rather than the bottom. A notarised affidavit from all the legal heirs is required above the threshold whether or not a court document is also produced. Families sometimes obtain the court grant first and assume it replaces everything else; it does not, and the affidavit still has to be collected from people who may by then have scattered.
A will is not always enough on its own, and for some wills probate is not a choice. SEBI records that under section 57 read with section 213 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925 probate is mandatory for certain wills, including those of Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jainas falling within the specified classes, and certain Parsi wills.
The words specified classes are doing real work there, and this page does not expand them. Whether a particular will falls inside those classes turns on where it was made and where the property is, and getting that wrong in either direction is expensive: a family that petitions unnecessarily loses a year, and a family that does not petition when it must gets a will the registrar will not act on.
So the order of operations is: find the will, establish whether probate is mandatory for this will, ask the registrar what it requires, and only then decide whether to go to court. Families routinely do these in reverse, starting with the petition. If a will is likely to be contested, a caveat is a separate and time-sensitive step that belongs at the beginning rather than after a grant has issued.
Where shares are held jointly and one holder dies, the position is simpler than anything else on this page: the securities go to the surviving holder or holders. There is no contest between a nominee and an heir at that moment, because the holding has not yet reached the point where either question arises.
That simplicity is also why joint holding gets used as a substitute for estate planning, and why it should not be. It defers the question rather than answering it. When the last surviving holder dies, everything described on this page happens then, with the added difficulty that the people who could have explained the arrangement are gone.
So a joint holding deserves a nomination too. SEBI’s own material puts it as advice rather than obligation: it is desirable to provide a nominee even where the folio is held jointly. The reason is the one above. The survivor becomes a sole holder, and a sole holder with no nomination is the hardest case there is.
The transmission request on the survivorship route is made on Form ISR-5, signed by the surviving holder or holders, and it travels with a small set of papers.
| What goes in | Why it is asked for |
|---|---|
| Form ISR-5, duly signed by the survivor or survivors | It is the request itself, and it identifies the folio and the holding |
| The death certificate | It establishes the event the request depends on |
| The original share certificates | The old certificates are surrendered before new ones can be issued |
| The survivor PAN card and proof of address | The surviving holder becomes the holder of record and is identified as such |
Nothing in that list requires a court. That is the point of survivorship, and it is worth knowing before anybody is persuaded that a succession certificate is needed for a jointly held folio. Our joint account documentation work covers the same logic on the banking side, where the same misunderstanding costs families the same weeks.
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A family often has the will, knows what it says, and assumes that is the end of it. Whether that is enough depends on what is being claimed and from whom, and for securities the registrar will say what it needs.
A will on its own sits lower in the hierarchy than a grant from a court. SEBI’s own material reflects that: where only a will or a legal heirship certificate is produced, additional requirements attach, and for certain wills probate is not optional at all. So the honest answer to we have the will is a question back: has it been proved, and does it need to be.
Where it does need proving, that is a court process with its own timetable and its own page, and our probate of will work covers it. Where it does not, the will still has to be produced in a form the registrar will accept, which is a documentation question rather than a legal one.
The sequence that saves the most time: find out what the registrar requires before deciding whether to go to court. Families routinely start a probate petition they did not need, and occasionally skip one they did.
This is the commonest reason a transmission file stops, and it is almost never about the shares. A brother will not sign because of something else entirely, and the folio sits there for years while everybody waits.
The documents that need other people are specific, and it helps to know exactly which they are. Below the threshold the alternatives to a court grant are an indemnity bond with NOCs from all the legal heirs, or an attested family settlement deed. Above it, a notarised affidavit from all the legal heirs and a no-objection from all non-claimants sit alongside the court document. Each of those needs signatures from people who may not agree.
Where agreement is reachable, a settlement deed in the family, or a deed of relinquishment, beats any court route on both time and cost, and it settles more than the shares. Where it is not reachable, the court route exists precisely because consent cannot always be obtained, and pretending otherwise wastes a year.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it
Old physical certificates turn up in steel almirahs for companies that have changed their name twice, merged once and moved their registered office to a city nobody in the family has visited. The holding is real. Finding who now services it is the work.
The chain to follow is the company, then its registrar and transfer agent, then that agent’s current correspondence address. Each link is findable, and each has to be established rather than assumed, because writing to an address printed on a certificate from the 1990s produces nothing and consumes a month.
Where a certificate has been lost as well, that is a separate procedure with its own requirements, and it runs in parallel rather than afterwards. Starting both at once is the difference between a file that closes this year and one that does not.
Nothing in this section needs a court and most of it does not need us either. A family that simply writes to each registrar, asks what is unpaid against the folio and what is needed to release it, gets an answer. The reason it does not happen is that nobody knows the question exists.
Almost every long-held folio has money attached to it that nobody has taken. Warrants posted to an address the family left, electronic credits to an account that was closed, dividends on shares nobody remembered owning.
Two mechanisms matter here and they are different. The first is the Unpaid Dividend Account: where a folio is missing details, the dividend is not paid out but is held there until the details are furnished. That money is retrievable by fixing the folio, and it is one of the better reasons to fix a folio.
The second is what happens when nothing is claimed for long enough, dealt with in the next section. The distinction matters because the first is solved with paperwork at the registrar and the second is not solved there at all.
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None of which is a reason to assume money is gone. Families write off old folios all the time on the assumption that nothing can now be recovered, and that assumption is usually wrong. The money and the shares both have a route back; it is simply a different counter.
Where dividends go unclaimed for long enough, the law moves both the money and, in the circumstances it specifies, the shares themselves to a Government fund, the Investor Education and Protection Fund. Once that has happened, the claim is made against the Authority that administers the fund rather than against the company, and the company’s role becomes one of verification.
This page prints no period for that, and the reason is one we would rather state than hide. The rule is a specific one with a specific number of years in it, and we were unable to confirm that number from the Authority’s own published material at the time of writing; several of its pages would not open. We are not willing to print a statutory period on the strength of secondary summaries, because a reader who computes a date from a wrong number acts on it.
What to do instead, and it takes one search. The Authority publishes the rule, the claim form and the process itself. Check the position for your own holding against iepf.gov.in rather than against this page or any other. If the shares have already moved, the route is the Authority’s claim process with the company’s verification behind it, and the family papers you need are broadly those described above.
What can be said without a figure is the practical point. A folio nobody services for a long time does not stay where it is, and the longer it is left the more parties have to be dealt with. That is the argument for doing this now rather than in due course.
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A folio opened in 1987 says R. K. Sharma. The death certificate says Ram Kishan Sharma. The PAN says something slightly different again. Nobody doubts it is the same person, and the file still stops.
These mismatches are resolved with a declaration establishing that the names refer to one person, supported by whatever documents carry both versions. It is ordinary work, but it has to be identified at the start, because discovering it after the main set has been submitted costs another cycle. Our document verification step exists to catch exactly this before anything is filed.
The same applies to addresses that no longer exist, to a maiden name on the folio and a married name on the death certificate, and to a holding in a name that was never the holder’s legal name at all. Each is answerable. None answers itself.
A holding in a company that has merged, changed its name or moved registrars more than once takes longer than one that has not, and we will say so when we see it rather than after. The price does not change; the timeline does, and you should hear that at the start.
The listing for this work is ₹2,999 against a stated 15 – 45 days, and what it buys is everything this page describes: establishing which route applies, identifying the registrar, assembling and checking the documents, preparing the forms and the supporting declarations for signature, and following the file until the holding is registered or the position is clear.
It does not cover the court. A succession certificate, a probate petition or a letter of administration is a proceeding, conducted by an advocate.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it
Nor does it cover any charge levied by a registrar, a depository participant or a notary, or stamp duty on an indemnity bond or a settlement deed. Those are paid at actuals, to whoever levies them, and never marked up by us. We do not print their amounts here because they vary by State and by intermediary, and a figure on this page would be wrong for most of the people reading it.
Where more than one asset is involved, which is usual, we would rather see the whole picture than the shares alone. A life insurance claim, a bank account and a locker all ask for versions of the same documents, and assembling them once for everything is faster and cheaper than assembling them four times.
| Stage | What is done | Whose work |
|---|---|---|
| Reading | The holding, the folio or demat statement and the death certificate are read first, and the value is established, because the value decides the route | Us |
| Locating | The company, its registrar and the current correspondence address are confirmed rather than assumed | Us |
| Choosing | Nominee route, survivorship route, below-threshold route or court route, decided on the facts and told to you in writing with the reason | Us |
| Listing | The documents for that route are listed, and anything needing another person’s signature is flagged on day one rather than at the end | Us |
| Collecting | Originals, attestations, and the declarations that reconcile names and addresses | You, with our list |
| Preparing | The forms and the supporting documents are prepared and indexed for your signature | Us |
| Filing and following | Submitted to the registrar or the depository participant, with the acknowledgement kept, and followed until it is registered or a specific objection is received | Us |
The order is deliberate. Value before route, route before documents, documents before drafting. Reversing any of those produces a file that has to be done twice, and in this area doing it twice means another two months.
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Four things, and the first view comes back from them.
What the holding is. A demat statement, or the share certificates, or even a dividend warrant with a folio number on it. Anything that identifies the company and the holding.
Whether a nomination exists. If you do not know, say so; it is a question we can answer with the registrar rather than one you have to answer for us.
The death certificate, if the holder has died, and the names exactly as they appear on it.
Who the family is. Not a legal opinion on who inherits. Just who exists, because that determines whose signatures the route will need.
From those four we can usually say which route applies, roughly what it will take, and whether a court is involved. That answer is worth having before anybody starts collecting papers, because the wrong route collects the wrong papers.
A declaration naming heirs that leaves somebody out. If there is a sibling nobody wants to mention, that sibling exists and the declaration is false without them. This is the single most common request in this area and it is refused every time.
An indemnity bond for a claim we have been told is contested. An indemnity bond is a promise to make good a loss. Giving one while knowing somebody disputes the claim is not a formality; it is a liability the client would be signing into.
A nomination form signed by somebody other than the holder. Including by a family member acting with the best of intentions for a holder who is unwell.
A document dated earlier than the day it was made. No exceptions, and this is asked for more often here than on any other kind of file.
Advice on who inherits. We can tell you what the registrar will require. Who is entitled under succession law, where that is disputed, is for a lawyer and sometimes for a court.
Everything addressed to a company, a registrar or a depository participant is documentation, and it is the work described here. Forms, declarations, affidavits, indemnity bonds, correspondence, follow-up.
Anything addressed to a court is not. A petition for a succession certificate, a probate petition, an application for letters of administration, a caveat, an objection, an attendance of any kind: all of that is argued by an advocate, engaged by you and paid by you. When a file reaches that point we tell you so, and we aim to tell you in week one rather than month three.
There is a grey band in the middle worth naming. Preparing the papers that go into a court file is documentation; deciding what to ask the court for is not. We do the first where an advocate wants it done, and we do not do the second.
One further limit, said plainly because it decides whether we are the right people. If what you actually need is somebody to tell a reluctant relative that they are wrong, that is not documentation and we will not pretend it is. We can prepare a deed the moment there is something to record.
A date. The turnaround stated above is our part. How long a registrar or a depository participant takes is theirs, and it varies by intermediary and by season.
That no court will be needed. That depends on the value, on whether a nomination exists and on whether the family agrees, and all three are facts rather than choices.
That the threshold route will be accepted. The simplified set exists, and whether a particular registrar accepts a particular bond or deed is their call on their documents.
That a nominee will hand over. The nominee’s obligation is one thing; a nominee who refuses is a dispute, and a dispute goes to a court.
Any figure for what the shares are worth. We do not value holdings. We establish value only to the extent the route depends on it, and from the statement rather than from an opinion.
Two things, this week, and neither needs a decision about anything else.
Check whether every folio and every demat account you hold has a nomination on it, and whether the nominee named is still the person you would choose. People nominate once, at the start, and never look again; parents get nominated and then outlive nothing, marriages happen, children are born.
Then check whether your folios have your current PAN, contact details, bank details and signature on record. That is the difference between a dividend reaching you and a dividend sitting in an account waiting for you to update a form, and it is also the difference between your family dealing with a clean folio and a stalled one.
And the sentence worth saying out loud to whoever you nominate. That they will be the one to collect it, and that collecting is not the same as keeping. If that is a surprise to them later, it becomes a dispute. If it is said now, it becomes an arrangement. A will is how you decide the keeping part, and nomination is not a substitute for one.
And if you are not the nominee and somebody else is, do not treat that as a reason to stay out of it. The nominee collects on behalf of the heirs, and the heirs being involved from the start is what keeps that straightforward.
Start with the statement rather than the grief of the paperwork. Find out what is held and where, because until that is known nobody can tell you which route applies or whether a court is involved.
Order a batch of certified death certificates on day one. Every institution wants one and most want an original or a properly attested copy, and running out of them midway through is a predictable and entirely avoidable delay. The same copies will be wanted by banks, by insurers and by anybody else holding something in the name. Our estate distribution documentation page deals with running all of those together rather than one at a time.
And do not begin a court process in the first week. Establish the value and the nomination position first. A very large number of families petition for a grant they did not need, because somebody at a counter said the word and nobody checked it against the threshold.
Forward the demat statement or the share certificates and the death certificate if there is one. You will get the route, the documents it needs and a straight answer on whether a court is involved, before anything is prepared.
Who collects, and who keeps. Nomination answers the first. Succession answers the second. The form on your folio only ever asked you the first one, and the trouble in this area comes almost entirely from people believing it asked both.
This page is built on the nomination and transmission framework for securities as the Securities and Exchange Board of India states it in its own published material, read with the Companies Act, 2013 and the Indian Succession Act, 1925. On the status of a nominee, SEBI’s Frequently Asked Questions record that a nominee is merely a trustee, limited to collecting the assets of the deceased and transferring it to the legal heir or heirs, and that the nomination form itself provides that nominees receive the assets as trustee and on behalf of the legal heir or heirs. SEBI records that position as resting on an order of the Supreme Court dated 14 December 2023 together with its own circulars dated 10 January 2025 and 28 February 2025. This page does not quote the judgment, because the Court’s own record of it could not be retrieved at the time of writing; the proposition is stated on SEBI’s authority, as SEBI states it.
On making and changing a nomination, SEBI’s material records that a nomination for a folio is made on Form SH-13; that where there is more than one nominee the form must clearly mention the names of the nominees and the entitlement percentage against each nominee; that multiple nominees are not permitted where a nominee is a minor; that the nomination form or the opt-out form has to be provided separately for each folio; that a nomination once made may be modified by submitting a fresh nomination form, and is cancelled by submitting Form SH-14 together with the Form ISR-3 declaration for opting out; that an investor who wishes to opt out of nomination submits Form ISR-3 to the registrar and transfer agent for that folio; that where the holder signs by thumb impression rather than by wet signature a witness is required; and that the expected timeline for processing a nomination request is thirty days.
On whether a folio can be frozen, SEBI’s material records that registrars and transfer agents cannot freeze the folios of an investor for non-updation of PAN or of the choice of nomination. What attaches instead is a restriction on service: grievances and service requests on a folio lacking the specified details are taken up only once those details are furnished; for a folio lacking PAN, contact details, bank details or specimen signature, payment is made only through electronic mode with effect from 1 April 2024; and unpaid dividends on such a folio are held in the Unpaid Dividend Account until the details are updated. Separately, SEBI’s investor portal records that the earlier date of 31 December 2023 for providing a nomination or an opt-out for mutual fund folios and demat accounts was extended to 30 June 2024, and describes folios and accounts without either as frozen under that extended deadline, while recording that the choice of nomination for trading accounts is voluntary. The two statements are set out on this page as they stand, together with the distinction they turn on, rather than resolved into a single rule.
On transmission where a nomination exists, SEBI’s material records that on the death of the sole holder or of all holders the nominee submits a duly signed transmission request form together with KYC details and documents, the original death certificate or a copy of it attested by the nominee, the nominee’s PAN card, and the original securities certificate. On the death of one of several joint holders, the securities are transferred to the surviving holder or holders on a duly signed Form ISR-5 from the survivors, with the death certificate, the original share certificates and the survivor’s PAN card and proof of address.
On transmission where no nomination exists, SEBI’s material records a threshold that governs which set of documents is required: rupees five lakh per listed entity for securities held in physical form, and rupees fifteen lakh per beneficial owner for securities held in dematerialised form. Where the value is above the threshold, the legal heirs submit Form ISR-5, the original share certificate, the death certificate, PAN with proof of address, a notarised affidavit from all the legal heirs, a no-objection from all non-claimants, and a succession certificate, probate or an equivalent document, with further requirements where only a will or a legal heirship certificate is produced. Where the value is at or below the threshold and no succession certificate or probate exists, a notarised indemnity bond may be submitted together with either no-objection certificates from all the legal heirs or an attested family settlement deed.
On wills, SEBI’s material records that under section 57 read with section 213 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925 probate is mandatory for certain wills, including those of Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jainas falling within the specified classes, and certain Parsi wills. SEBI has separately issued a circular dated 19 September 2025, numbered SEBI/HO/MIRSD/MIRSD-PoD/P/CIR/2025/130 and titled Ease of doing investment — Smooth transmission of securities from Nominee to Legal Heir, and a circular dated 10 January 2025, numbered SEBI/HO/OIAE/OIAE_IAD-3/P/ON/2025/01650 and titled Circular on Revise and Revamp Nomination Facilities in the Indian Securities Market. The text of neither circular could be retrieved at the time of writing, and nothing is attributed to their contents here beyond their titles, numbers and dates.
On what this page deliberately withholds, no period is stated for the transfer of unclaimed dividends or of the related shares to the Investor Education and Protection Fund, because that period could not be confirmed from the Authority’s own published material; no registrar, depository, notarial or stamp charge is stated, those varying by State and by intermediary; and no view is expressed on who is entitled to inherit in any particular family, which is a question of succession law on facts rather than a documentation question.
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