Retrieving Lost Shares? Enter The Labyrinth

When Mumbai resident Rajiv Singh, 50, got a call four-five years ago from a Gujarat-based financial agent that a significant number of shares belonging to him, his parents and his brothers were lying unclaimed, he thought it was a hoax call. But after multiple calls and meetings, and when the consultant gave him the names of some of the shares and informed him that they had acquired substantial value now, he thought it was worth checking. Says Singh, “We had shares of big companies like Reliance, Kotak, and Tata in the 1990s, but we lost track of them, and they got lost when we moved houses.” At the time, shares were issued as physical certificates, and the family had misplaced them over the years. These shares belonging to Singh’s family landed in the Investors Education Protection Fund (IEPF), a repository of unclaimed shares and dividends created under the Companies...