Glossary

Every word we use, explained

Unclaimed money: Money in a bank, insurer, provident fund or company that the owner or family has not collected, often because nobody knew it existed.
Nominee: A person named on an account or policy to receive the money. Under Indian law the nominee usually holds it in trust for the legal heirs.
Legal heir: A family member entitled to the money by law when there is no valid nominee. Who counts depends on the personal law that applies.
Legal heir certificate: A certificate from the local revenue office (tehsildar) that lists the family members entitled. Usually 15 to 30 days.
Succession certificate: A court order that names who may collect debts and securities. Needed for larger amounts when there is no nominee. Court fees are a percentage of the value, capped by state.
Indemnity bond: A signed promise on stamp paper to return the money if someone with a better claim appears. Banks accept it instead of a court order for smaller amounts.
AIS (Annual Information Statement): A yearly statement from the Income Tax Department listing interest, dividends and other income paid to a person. It reveals every bank and company that paid them.
UDGAM: RBI's portal to search unclaimed bank deposits across 30 banks in one place. Deposits with no activity for 10 years or more.
DEA Fund: The Depositor Education and Awareness Fund, where banks move deposits unclaimed for 10 years. The money can still be claimed from the bank.
IEPF: The Investor Education and Protection Fund. Companies move dividends unpaid for 7 years, and the related shares, here. Families can claim them back online.
MITRA: SEBI's Mutual fund Investment Tracing and Retrieval Assistant, a portal to find forgotten mutual fund folios.
Bima Bharosa: IRDAI's insurance grievance portal, which also links every insurer's unclaimed amounts search.
EPFO and UAN: The Employees' Provident Fund Organisation manages provident fund for salaried workers. The UAN is the 12-digit member number.
Ombudsman: A free official who resolves complaints against a bank (RBI), insurer (IRDAI) or other institution when they do not respond.
Rule engine: A written checklist the computer follows exactly. The same input always gives the same result, and every rule has tests.
Structured output: A way of making the AI answer in a fixed format (a JSON schema), so the app never breaks on an unexpected answer.
The AI Review: Before you see a route, one AI looks for what could go wrong with it, another reviews that concern, and a referee gives a verdict with reasons and risks. The referee can only add caution, never override the rules.
Bring Your Own (BYO): Institutions can use Virasat with their own data, their own AI key, or their own claim rules.
Lakh and crore: 1 lakh = 1,00,000 (one hundred thousand). 1 crore = 1,00,00,000 (ten million). 1 lakh crore = one trillion.
DPDP Act 2023: India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act: consent, purpose limitation, minimal data, and the right to delete.
Multimodal AI: An AI model that can read images as well as text, so it can look at a photograph of a passbook and pull out the account number.
axe: The industry standard automated accessibility checker. It scans a page against the WCAG rules and reports anything that would block a screen reader or a keyboard user.
Lighthouse: Google's built-in tool for scoring a web page out of 100 on speed, accessibility, best practices and search visibility. Anyone can run it from Chrome.
WCAG 2.2 AA: The international accessibility standard for websites. AA is the level most governments require, including India's GIGW guidelines for government sites.
Problem details (RFC 9457): An internet standard for API error messages, so every error comes back in the same predictable shape with a plain-language explanation instead of a bare error code.
Account Aggregator: India's consent-based system that lets a person share their own bank data with a service they choose, without sharing a password. Regulated by the RBI.
DigiLocker: The Government of India's official app for storing verified documents such as certificates and identity proofs, so they do not have to be uploaded again.
Common Service Centre (CSC): A government-backed village level service point where a trained operator helps people with online government services. There are about 5 lakh of them across India.
Rate limit: A cap on how many times a minute one key may call the API, so a single user cannot overwhelm the service for everyone else.
Token: The unit an AI model reads and writes in, roughly three quarters of a word. Models are billed per token, so counting tokens is how you work out what something really costs.
Prompt cache: Storing the unchanging part of an instruction so repeat calls do not pay to process it again. A cached read costs about a tenth of a fresh one.
Batch API: A way of sending work that does not need an answer this second. It costs half as much, which suits overnight jobs but not a family waiting at a counter.
Unit economics: What one user, or in our case one family, actually costs to serve. The number that decides whether something can run at national scale or only in a demo.
Data minimisation: Collecting and keeping as little personal information as the job needs. Under India's DPDP Act this is a duty, not a courtesy.
Rule corpus: The full collection of claim rule files, one per institution, kept as versioned data anyone can read, check and add to.