Bengaluru-based Sukanth Rallapati and Vaibhav Dalal have been together for 14 years. They own a piece of land, run a household, and have built, by every measure that matters to them, a family. When they bought that land as an investment a few years ago, both their names were added to the title once the transaction closed. There was no way to record what they were to one another.

“We couldn’t say we were each other’s spouse or partner in any legally meaningful sense,” says Sukanth, 48. That’s a reality queer couples continue to navigate.”

On October 17 2023, the Supreme Court declined to grant same-sex couples the right to marry, holding in a 3-2 verdict in Supriyo v. Union of India that the question belonged to Parliament. Almost three years on, Parliament has not acted. There is no marriage, no civil union, and no registered partnership.

There was, briefly, the appearance of movement. On August 28 2024, the Finance Ministry clarified that queer couples face no restrictions in opening a joint bank account or naming a partner as nominee; the Reserve Bank of India had told scheduled commercial banks the same a week earlier. Read carefully, the advisory created nothing. It clarified that no bar had ever existed. What stopped couples was rarely the rulebook. It was the counter, where two unrelated men or women asking to bank together have often been met with questions about a relationship that, without marriage, cannot be proved on paper.

“More than the banks, it’s the regulatory specifications of each bank for opening accounts that are the problem,” says a former banking professional on condition on anonymity. Many banks, the observation goes, will raise questions when two unrelated men or women try to open a joint account together, querying a relationship status that, in the absence of legal marriage, cannot be substantiated on paper, even when both customers’ KYC documents are flawless.

Change on the ground

Axis Bank launched its #ComeAsYouAre charter on September 6 2021, three years ahead of the advisory, enabling joint accounts and partner nominations regardless of gender or marital status, and introducing the gender-neutral honorific ‘Mx.’

“The conversation was never ‘should we do this?’ It was ‘how do we do this right?’” says Shruthi Bopaiah, Executive Vice President and Head of Sparsh (Customer Obsession) at Axis Bank. Nothing in the framework had ever barred a joint account or the nomination of a non-spouse, she points out; the bank simply chose to say so, and build for it, before being told it could. The bank’s internal Pride network now runs over a thousand strong, and it holds more than 7,000 accounts for transgender and gender-diverse customers. In one town outside the metros, she says, a customer opened a joint account with their partner and chose the ‘Mx’ honorific at the counter, the branch completing the process “as a matter of routine rather than exception.” Where complaints surface, she adds, the question the bank asks itself is not whether to step back but how to do better.

Notably, Axis does not count its same-sex couples. “We would rather enable with dignity than reduce identities to data,” Shruthi says.

The ceiling no bank can raise

Sumir Nagar, who spent three decades building banking operations across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, explains why. “The conversation was always about audit trails, KYC, and regulatory exposure. Never about the shape of a customer’s family,” he says. “The family they imagined while building the form was the only family the form could see.”

Under Indian law, a nominee is not an heir. In Sarbati Devi v. Usha Devi (1984), reaffirmed in Shakti Yezdani (2023), the Supreme Court held that a nominee receives money only as a trustee for the legal heirs. For a queer person, that design can be devastating. “A queer person can name their partner as a nominee, feel protected, and then, after death, the partner stands as a legal custodian who may be required to hand everything over to estranged parents,” Sumir says. “That isn’t a loophole, but the design.”

Shruthi concedes that succession and insurance are “still being worked through, shaped as much by law as by policy.”

Privilege, and a boring remedy

The cleaner experiences, Sumir says, come from private banks and wealth desks. “It isn’t only about sexuality. It’s about privilege. A couple with a private banker and a good estate lawyer can engineer around almost every gap. A couple at a crowded branch with a standard savings account cannot.”

Radhika Piramal knows both ends. The former managing director of VIP Industries and co-founder of Pride Fund India, India’s first dedicated LGBTQIA+ philanthropy fund, says she has never even attempted to open a joint account in India. She is precise about what marriage withholds. “It is also a contract with the state,” she says. “That contract gives certain entitlements: a joint bank account, sharing property, automatic inheritance to the spouse, next-of-kin medical rights.”

The remedy exists, and it is unglamorous. A registered will overrides any nomination. A will, a power of attorney, jointly held assets, beneficial nomination on insurance where allowed: none of it requires Parliament, only foresight. Sukanth and Vaibhav are now drafting exactly this. “We’re trying to make sure we don’t leave each other in limbo,” he says.

Until succession law catches up, the most radical financial act a queer couple can perform is a profoundly boring one. Sumir reduces it to three lines: Write the will, register it, but don’t trust the form.

Note: Under Section 45ZA of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949, the nominee on a bank deposit receives the funds on the account holder’s death and the bank is discharged on paying them. This does not make the nominee the owner.