Forgotten Mutual Fund Investments? How to Trace Old Folios on SEBI's MITRA Platform (2026 Guide)

By Nitish Bharadwaj · Published Sep 24, 2026 · 6 min

MITRA (Mutual Fund Investment Tracing and Retrieval Assistant) is a search platform SEBI mandated through its circular of February 12, 2025, run jointly by the registrars CAMS and KFintech. It lists inactive folios — those with a unit balance but no investor-initiated transaction for 10 years — including old folios that were never linked to a PAN. Investors or legal heirs can search it through MF Central, AMFI, AMC or SEBI websites, then claim units by updating KYC or completing transmission with the fund house.

Sort through an elderly parent's papers and you may find a yellowed mutual fund account statement from 1998, or a dividend warrant that was never banked. The fund house still holds those units. The problem is that the folio probably has no PAN, a long-gone address and no email, so it never shows up in anyone's consolidated statement. SEBI's MITRA platform exists to close exactly that gap.

What MITRA Is

MITRA stands for Mutual Fund Investment Tracing and Retrieval Assistant. SEBI mandated it through a circular dated February 12, 2025, after a consultation paper in December 2024. The platform is built and hosted jointly by the two qualified registrar and transfer agents — CAMS and KFin Technologies — which together service almost every mutual fund in India. That makes it the first single, industry-wide database of dormant folios.

MITRA is reachable from the websites of MF Central, AMFI, individual fund houses, CAMS, KFintech and SEBI. You do not need a separate registration with each fund house.

What Counts as an Inactive Folio

SEBI defines an inactive folio as one with a unit balance but no investor-initiated transaction — financial or non-financial — for the last 10 years. A dividend credited automatically does not count as your transaction; a redemption, switch, address change or nomination update does. Folios end up here for predictable reasons:

• Investments made in the physical-form era, before PAN became mandatory for mutual funds.
• Addresses, phone numbers or bank accounts that changed and were never updated.
• The investor died and the family did not know the investment existed.
• Small amounts bought during an NFO and forgotten.

How to Search on MITRA

1. Open MF Central (or the MITRA link on AMFI, CAMS, KFintech or your fund house's website) and choose the inactive or unclaimed folio search.
2. Enter the investor's PAN or PEKRN if available, and verify your own mobile number or email through an OTP.
3. Add the other details you know — investor name, old address, date of birth, bank or contact details — to widen or narrow the match. Old folios often match only on name and address.
4. Review the results. The platform shows matching folios with the fund house, so you know whom to approach.

Try variations of the name — initials, maiden names, spellings used on old documents — because records from the 1990s were keyed in by hand. Search attempts per session are limited, so use the details you are most confident about first.

Claiming the Units After You Find Them

Finding a folio does not move money. The next step depends on whether the original investor is alive.

If you are the investor, contact the fund house or its registrar with the folio details and complete KYC: PAN, Aadhaar-based or in-person verification, current address and a bank account with a cancelled cheque. Once the folio is KYC-compliant, you can redeem, switch or keep the units. Add a nominee at the same time — our explainer on the SEBI nomination rule for mutual funds and demat accounts covers the current requirements.

If the investor has died, the units go through transmission. A registered nominee needs the death certificate, their own KYC and a transmission request form. Where no nominee was recorded, legal heirs usually need a succession certificate or other legal-heir documents, and the requirements rise with the value involved. The steps are laid out in our guide to SEBI's securities transmission rules for legal heirs.

Don't Forget Unclaimed Dividends and Redemptions

Units are one pot; cash payouts are another. Dividends and redemption proceeds that could not be credited — a closed bank account, an uncashed cheque — are classed as unclaimed amounts, and industry data compiled by AMFI puts the total above ₹3,000 crore. SEBI rules require fund houses to park this money in dedicated liquid or money market plans. If you claim within three years you receive the amount plus the income earned on it; after that, you still get the original amount plus income up to the end of year three, and later income goes to investor education.

Each fund house has an unclaimed amount search on its website. The same discipline that keeps bank money from going dormant applies here — see how dormant bank accounts are reactivated for the parallel process on deposits.