e-KYC error flags 24 lakh Ladki Bahin beneficiaries as government employees, halts aid disbursement

Mumbai: A flawed question in the e-KYC process for the Ladki Bahin scheme has resulted in more than 24 lakh women beneficiaries in Maharashtra being wrongly classified as government employees, leading to the abrupt stoppage of their monthly financial assistance.

The error, acknowledged by the Women and Child Welfare Department (WCD), has now forced the government to deploy nearly one lakh anganwadi workers across the state to physically verify the affected beneficiaries.

A senior official from the department on Wednesday said one of the questions in the e-KYC form was wrongly framed, using two negative words instead of a simple query.

The question in Marathi read "Tumchya gharatle koni sarkari nokrit nahi na?" (Nobody in your family works for the government, right?)

Officials said that beneficiaries, who should have answered "no", marked "yes" due to the confusing sentence construction.

The question confused the respondents and around 24 lakh replied in the affirmative. This was automatically taken to mean that at least one family member was a government employee, and the system stopped the monthly payment, the WCD official said.

The scale of the error became clear during data review, the official said, as Maharashtra has 8 to 9 lakh government employees, including those in semi-government bodies and corporations.

"We also started receiving complaints from different parts of the state regarding non-payment of the monthly instalment (of Rs 1,500 given under the scheme)," he said.

State Women and Child Welfare Minister Aditi Tatkare, in a post on X on Tuesday night, said the physical verification of these beneficiaries would be carried out by anganwadi workers to correct the records.

The e-KYC exercise covered around 2.30 crore beneficiaries and was aimed at ensuring eligibility under the scheme. The deadline for completing e-KYC was December 31, 2025.

The state releases around Rs 3,700 crore every month for nearly 2.25 crore beneficiaries, with each eligible woman receiving Rs 1,500 per month.

The e-KYC exercise was taken up following complaints that men were receiving the assistance or that government employees had been registered as beneficiaries.

Last month, in a written reply to the state legislative council, Tatkare said the verification drive had revealed serious misuse of the scheme.

As many as 14,298 men were identified as having received financial benefits under the scheme, meant exclusively for women, and more than 1,500 state government employees were found to have illegally claimed the assistance, she informed the House.

The government has initiated recovery proceedings against the men and government employees who wrongly availed of the benefits, the minister had said.