Maharashtra’s Ladki Bahin Yojana: Waiting for ₹1,500

R.Adhika Kamble, 49, brims with anger whenever someone mentions Ladki Bahin Yojana, Maharashtra’s welfare initiative targeting women. He feels betrayed because two years after the scheme was announced, he is yet to become a beneficiary. He says that this process is very tiring for a widow who takes care of the house and there is no help.

But that wasn’t what made her feel vulnerable. A few months after her husband’s death, she was asked to take a photo without the mangalsutra, the symbol of marriage.

“They told me that the authorities should be able to easily identify women who really need money. Married women don’t need it that much. We need it the most. They said the government would understand after looking at our photos,” she says. He succumbs to his emotions. Sitting in a small, unventilated room in Sangamnagar, Mumbai, he goes over the documents and his photo over and over again. “Maybe money wasn’t written in my destiny,” he says, disappointed.

Malfunctions and headaches

The Maharashtra government launched the Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana on June 28, 2024, under the leadership of then Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, “to promote women’s economic independence, improve their health and nutrition, and strengthen their decisive role in the family,” according to the policy document.

The government said the scheme will provide £1,500 through Direct Benefit Transfer to women aged 21 to 65 from low-income families in Maharashtra. The family’s annual income would be below ₹ 2.5 lakh.

The Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana, translated as the Prime Minister’s ‘My Favorite Sister’ scheme, was modeled on a similar scheme in Madhya Pradesh and was expected to cost the government ₹46,000 crore annually.

The government set the terms and conditions of the plan. Women who had a family member working for the government, belonged to families that paid taxes, or belonged to families that owned a car were not eligible for this right. There was a limit of two women per household who could benefit from cash assistance. Those who received similar amounts of money from other government programs were also ineligible.

In July, the first month after the scheme was launched, Amol Shinde, who was the head of the CM Welfare Cell when the scheme was launched in the previous Eknath Shinde government, says the government received 1.5 crore applications from across Maharashtra. The first payments to 1.5 crore women began in August 2024, two days before Raksha Bandhan and a few months before the Assembly elections. Women flocked to banks to install the Know Your Customer (KYC) system to benefit from the money. In the second month, September, around 2.6 crore women registered. Shinde said applications have started being reviewed and only 2.4 crore have received benefits. The government later introduced another requirement requiring women to complete e-KYC verification, after which the number of beneficiaries started decreasing. In December 2025, the number of beneficiaries was 1.57 crore.

Women tied the rakhis to then Mahrashtra CM Eknath Shinde after the launch of the “Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin” scheme at Vidhan Bhavan in Mumbai on June 29, 2024. | Photo Credit: ANI

Many women say that payments were made for several months and were stopped even though all documentation was completed. Some beneficiaries still struggle to link their Aadhaar numbers to their bank accounts through an online system that often requires outside help to fill out the necessary forms.

The Opposition in Maharashtra has trained its guns on the government over reducing the number of beneficiaries and the financial strain the scheme has put on the State exchequer. He accused the government of diverting funds from other welfare programs to continue providing assistance under Majhi Ladki Bahin.

In June 2025, Nationalist Congress Party (SP) MP Supriya Sule told reporters that the scheme was a ₹4,800 crore scam in which 14,000 men benefited. He called for a white paper and Special Investigation Report (SIT) on the programme, saying many deserving women were left out.

According to the Department of Women and Child Development, flawed e-KYC questions in 2025 wrongly flagged 24 lakh beneficiaries as government employees and stopped their installments. Technical problems and glitches in the portal have negatively affected the effective implementation of the program so far; women complained about OTP failures, Aadhaar-bank connection errors and data mismatches.

A verification exercise in July 2025 led to the suspension of 26.34 lakh accounts due to irregularities, including multiple claims from the same family, men receiving funds and beneficiaries receiving dual plan benefits. Later, re-verification was done by the district collectors. In January 2026, the e-KYC deadline was extended to 31 March 2026 as a ‘last chance’ to fix errors/OTP issues.

Women speak openly

In Mumbai’s Sangamnagar, Radhika, a mother of two children, both in their 20s, lost her husband. A clerk fell and broke his hip. “We didn’t have the money to have him operated on,” he says. He finally died.

The period after his death is like fog for him. When the plan was announced, a local politician joined forces with local party workers who went door to door handing out forms of the plan. Many women said that they queued at this pace to submit the forms along with their documents.

Radhika was one of them. When other women started depositing their installments into their own accounts and she could not get an installment, she went to the bank and got information. They asked him to check it online. The operator of the cyber cafe around his house asked him to visit his bank, saying some KYC documents were pending. He went back and forth between the bank and the internet cafe many times. Every time he had to go to the nationalized bank, he had to skip odd jobs he found nearby.

“After a few visits, my son asked me not to worry and to give it up. I still think there needs to be a solution. But there is no helpline and no one to guide me,” she says. Now that a new window has opened for e-KYC, he has filled this form online and hopes to get registered as a beneficiary.

The situation is similar for 55-year-old Shakuntala Devi, whose bank account is not linked to her Aadhaar number. Devi stays with her husband, two daughters and grandson. He lost his son last year. Her husband is a taxi driver.

“His account was automatically closed,” says his daughter Nandini Gautam, 26. “We don’t know if it was because he was inactive. We opened another account and linked it to his Aadhaar, but records showed that the insemination was not active. The bank told us to fill a DBT form. We filled it. But he is yet to receive even a single installment.”

Nandini was receiving installments till December 2025, when she was asked to do the KYC again. He says that server issues and website issues did not allow him to complete the KYC process in the stipulated time and adds that he now completes the process over the phone after the new window opens.

22-year-old Pragati Nakti, a mother of a baby, was receiving her installments regularly until June 2025 without any problems. He doesn’t know why. He said nothing had changed and added that the post office where his money was deposited could not find a reason. She lives with her brother, parents and uncle and is the only woman in the house who fills out the form.

Apart from filling the form online on the portal, many women also filled offline forms through Anganwadi sevikasASHA workers and gram sevaks. In fact, a few months ago ASHA workers and Anganwadi sevikas I refused to shoulder the extra burden of the job anymore.

Use of funds

Women say this money helps them spend on medicine, children’s food, education and the family’s daily needs. “We don’t need to ask our husbands for money anymore. We get our own money. It feels good. But we don’t know for how long we can get it. There is always a feeling that it will stop any moment,” says Shabnam Abdul Gaffar Shah, a 35-year-old mother of five living in Mumbai’s Indiranagar.

The plan helped buffer the shock of floods in Marathwada of Maharashtra in 2025. Shinde says this helps empower women and provides a boost to the rural economy.

He says they got this intelligence from women. “We had set up a helpline to get responses from women, who were the first beneficiaries. The impact of the scheme was astounding. Shops started to thrive again. Women were seen spending primarily on healthcare, children’s education and clothing,” he says.

Shinde says Madhya Pradesh’s Ladli Behna Yojana is his role model, but he is inspired by the success of the government’s own scheme, Shasan Aplya Daari, which means government at your doorstep. Under this programme, the government approached people with plans to increase the number of beneficiaries.

“After analyzing the data, we realized that very few women were benefiting from government programmes. That’s when we thought we needed to do something to increase women’s coverage,” she says. At the time, the Opposition had criticized the timing of the plan, considering it took place just before the Maharashtra elections.

On a pilot basis, Mukhyamantri Mahila Sashktikaran Abhiyaan or Prime Minister’s Women Empowerment Movement has been launched in two districts of Maharashtra. It was almost immediately withdrawn due to technical problems, but was reintroduced after a government order was amended on 6 October 2023.

“Inspired by its success, we launched the Nari Shaktidoot app. Within a day, 50,000 women signed up for the app. Once we saw that women were aware of and interested in the programmes, we worked to roll out this program in just three months. After the announcement, 2.47 crore women signed up. This was a record and a very satisfying process,” he said.

He added that he prepared a list of 10 names and the then Prime Minister Eknath Shinde liked it and chose the current name as ‘Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana’.