India Company Register: How to Search the MCA21 Portal and Verify Indian Companies (2026)

1. What is the Indian company register?

India has no single office called "the company register". Registration is a function of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, in Hindi कॉर्पोरेट कार्य मंत्रालय, under the Companies Act, 2013. Section 396 of that Act has the Central Government set up registration offices with their own jurisdictions and appoint Registrars to run them. The Find CIN form on the MCA portal lists 32 Registrar of Companies offices, named after the states and cities they cover, from Chennai and Mumbai to Guwahati and Pondicherry. All of them work in one electronic system: MCA21, now in its third version, V3.

New companies do not start at their RoC. The Central Registration Centre processes name reservations and incorporation forms for new companies and LLPs, and on incorporation the Registrar allots the company its CIN. After that, the company files with the Registrar: its financial statements on form AOC-4 (or AOC-4 XBRL) and its annual return on MGT-7, or the abridged MGT-7A for One Person Companies and small companies. LLPs are registered under a separate law, the Limited Liability Partnership Act, 2008, and file Form 8 (Statement of Account and Solvency) and Form 11 (Annual Return of LLP).

2. How to search the MCA21 register step by step

The master data search on the MCA portal is not public. When we tried it for this guide, searching for Reliance Industries, Master Data Services sent us straight to the MCA21 login page, and so did the document viewer. Here is what still works without an account, and where the wall is.

1. Start at mca.gov.in

   The portal runs in English, with a Hindi version behind the हिन्दी button at the top right. The register services sit under MCA Services: Master Data, the FO Services such as Find CIN, and the document services.

2. Open the master data search, and expect a login page

   Opening Master Data Services, View Public Documents, or Check Annual Filing Status redirects you to the MCA User Login / Registration page, which offers a login form and a Register button. The User ID field asks for a CIN, LLPIN, or FCRN if you log in as a company or LLP, and an email address for everyone else.

   

3. Find the CIN without logging in

   Find CIN, under FO Services, opens without a login. It searches four ways: by registration number (pick the Registrar of Companies office from the dropdown first, then enter the six-digit number), by the current company or LLP name, by an inactive CIN, or by a former name. Every search goes through a CAPTCHA, so the form is built for one lookup at a time.

4. Decide whether you need an account

   Everything beyond the CIN, the master record and the filed documents, needs an MCA21 user account. The MCA's registration guidance says one email address and PAN (the income-tax Permanent Account Number) must be used for one user. It says a basic Registered User can only view and file the name-reservation and incorporation forms, so it tells users to register as Business Users, and every Business User role it lists registers with an Indian identifier: a PAN, a DIN or DPIN, or a company's CIN or LLPIN. We did not create an account for this guide.

5. Pay to view the documents you need

   Once logged in, View Public Documents shows what the company has filed with its Registrar. According to the portal's Enquire Fees page, viewing a company's documents costs INR 100 and an LLP's INR 50. The page labels its figures as indicative.

3. What data is public and what it costs

India's fees are low. The real cost is the account. Without one, you get the CIN lookup and the published lists. With one, a company's filed documents are INR 100 away.

Two things follow from that table. First, financial statements are public by law. Section 137 of the Companies Act requires every company to file its financial statements with the Registrar within 30 days of its annual general meeting (a One Person Company has 180 days from the end of the financial year), and section 399 lets any person inspect filed documents by electronic means on payment of a fee. Second, the fee is not the obstacle. INR 100 is cheap by any standard. The account behind it is the harder part: MCA's guidance asks users to register as Business Users, and every Business User role it lists registers with a PAN, a DIN or DPIN, or a CIN or LLPIN.

What you will not get without logging in is the company file: Master Data Services and View Public Documents both sit behind the login. The free side of the register is built to give you a CIN. And what a company files are e-forms (AOC-4 for the financial statements, MGT-7 or MGT-7A for the annual return), not a dataset.

4. Indian legal forms, briefly

The Companies Act, 2013 defines most company forms in section 2, and section 4 fixes the end of the name: "Limited" for a public limited company, "Private Limited" for a private one. That suffix is the fastest way to tell which kind of company you are dealing with. LLPs sit outside the Companies Act entirely, under their own law.

If you are matching a supplier list against the register, read the suffix before anything else. A counterparty that calls itself a public company but carries "Private Limited" in its name, or the other way round, is worth a second look. A Section 8 company may legitimately carry neither.

5. How to verify an Indian company: a practical checklist

1. Confirm the CIN

   Ask for the CIN, then search the company's name in Find CIN and check that the CIN you get back is the one you were given, under the name on your contract. The form's results table has columns for the CIN or LLPIN and for the company or LLP status, so look at both. If all you have is a name, note every CIN that comes back. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Check the suffix against the story

   Section 4 of the Companies Act fixes "Limited" for public companies and "Private Limited" for private ones. If the name and the claimed legal form disagree, find out why before you go further.

3. Look for former names and inactive CINs

   Find CIN searches old company names and inactive CINs as well as current ones. If an older contract, invoice, or bank record carries a different name or CIN, this is where you connect the two.

4. Check the directors

   The Verify DIN/DPIN-PAN form, which opens without a login, takes a director's DIN or a designated partner's DPIN. Then check the person against the MCA's published list of directors disqualified under section 164(2)(a) and the list of directors associated with struck-off companies, both under Data & Reports.

5. Check the strike-off and alert lists

   The MCA publishes lists of companies struck off under section 248(5) (form STK-7), recently as weekly batches from C-PACE, its Centre for Processing Accelerated Corporate Exit, and the page filters by RoC office. Data & Reports also carries the public notices that precede a strike-off (STK-5 and STK-6), monthly lists of companies and LLPs struck off or closed, and lists of companies under strike-off and dormant companies. The vanishing companies lists exist too, but the latest regional files date from 2018.

6. Read the filed financial statements

   Log in, open View Public Documents, and pay the INR 100 to see the company's filings. Check the filing date as well as the figures: statements are due within 30 days of the annual general meeting, so a company with no recent AOC-4 on file is telling you something.

7. Order certified copies if you need them on paper

   For a bank, a court, or a tender, a Registrar-certified copy carries more weight than a screenshot. A certified certificate of incorporation costs INR 100, and any other public document INR 25 per page.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: on paper, India's register is open, because the Act lets anyone inspect what a company has filed. The limits are in how you get to it:

• The master data is behind a login. Master Data Services, View Public Documents, and Check Annual Filing Status all redirect to the MCA21 login page. Our search for Reliance Industries ended there.
• The account runs on Indian identifiers. MCA's guidance says one email address and PAN must be used for one user, pushes users to the Business User category, and registers every Business User role with a PAN, a DIN or DPIN, or a CIN or LLPIN. For a buyer outside India doing occasional checks, that can be a real barrier.
• A CAPTCHA on the one free lookup. Find CIN is open, but every search goes through a CAPTCHA, so it is not built for automated lookups.
• No API on the MCA portal. The portal's own sitemap lists no API, web service, or developer access, and no bulk download of the register.
• The portal's free bulk files cover changes, not the register. The monthly Excel lists show companies and LLPs registered that month, and the strike-off lists show who left. Neither is a complete copy of the register.
• Lists come in batches. The struck-off lists are published as separate files, a new STK-7 batch most weeks, so checking one company against all of them means opening many files.
• Documents, not data. Financial statements are filed as e-forms (AOC-4, or AOC-4 XBRL), and you read them by paying to view a company's documents. Cheap to read, expensive to turn into a dataset.

If you check one Indian supplier a year, an MCA21 account and a few hundred rupees will do. If you onboard hundreds, the login, the CAPTCHA, and the per-company fee are the whole problem.

7. Access MCA register data programmatically

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 35,677,344 Indian businesses in our directory, refreshed as new registrations and filings appear. CINs are already parsed and validated, and records are enriched with revenue, employees, industry codes, and contact data where we hold them.

Our Company Data API lets you look up any Indian entity by CIN, name, or address and get structured JSON back in real time, with 150 free lookups to start and no MCA21 account or CAPTCHA in the way. It is used by developers, banks, and insurers across 190+ countries, so Indian checks work exactly like checks anywhere else.

GET /v1/companies?country=IN&name=Reliance+Industries

We have left the response out on purpose. When we searched the MCA portal for Reliance Industries, the master data page sent us to the login screen, so this guide has no register record to check a response against, and we do not print values we have not seen on the register. Run the request with your free lookups and compare the result with the MCA master data yourself.

8. India vs other company registers

India opens filed documents to inspection by law and keeps the company file behind a login. For context: