Radhika Kamble, 49, seethes with anger every time someone mentions the Ladki Bahin Yojana, Maharashtra’s welfare initiative targeted at women. She feels betrayed, because two years after the scheme’s announcement, she has not yet been able to become a beneficiary. For a widow taking care of the household, the process was too overwhelming and there was no help, she says.
But that was not what left her feeling vulnerable. Within months of her husband dying, she was asked to take a photograph bereft of the mangalsutra, a symbol of marriage.
“They told me that the officials should be able to easily identify women who really need the money. Married women don’t need it as much. We need it the most. The government will understand after looking at our photos, we were told,” she says. She chokes on her emotions. Sitting in a small, unventilated room in Sangamnagar, Mumbai, she goes through the documents and her photo again and again. Frustrated, she says, “Maybe money is not written into my fate.”
Glitches 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,” as per the policy document.
The government said the scheme would provide ₹1,500 via a Direct Benefit Transfer to women in Maharashtra between ages 21 and 65 years, from low-income families. The family’s annual income was to be below ₹2.5 lakh.
Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana — translated as the Chief Minister’s ‘My Favourite Sister’ scheme — was modelled on a similar scheme in Madhya Pradesh, and was expected to cost the government ₹46,000 crore annually.
The government introduced terms and conditions for the scheme. Women who had a family member with government employment, or belonging to families that paid taxes, or belonged to families that owned a car did not qualify. There was a cap of two women per household who could get the cash benefit. Those who were getting similar amounts of money from other government schemes were also not eligible.
In July, the first month after the scheme was launched, the government received 1.5 crore applications from across Maharashtra, says Amol Shinde, who was the head of the CM Welfare Cell when the scheme was launched in the previous Eknath Shinde government. The first payments to the 1.5 crore women started in August 2024, two days ahead of Raksha Bandhan, and a few months ahead of the Assembly elections. Women thronged banks to get their Know-Your-Customer (KYC) established, so they could avail themselves of the money. In the second month, September, about 2.6 crore women were registered. The scrutiny of the applications than began taking place and only 2.4 crore received the benefit, says Shinde. The government subsequently introduced another condition requiring women to complete e-KYC verification, after which the number of beneficiaries began to decline. In December 2025, the number of beneficiaries was 1.57 crore.
Women tie 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 the payments came for several months, and then simply stopped, despite all documentation being complete. Some beneficiaries are still struggling to link their Aadhaar numbers to their bank accounts through an online system that often requires external assistance to complete the necessary forms.
The Opposition in Maharashtra has trained its guns on the government for slashing the number of beneficiaries, and for the financial strain the scheme has put on the State exchequer. It has accused the government of diverting funds from other welfare schemes to continue giving benefits under Majhi Ladki Bahin.
In June 2025, Nationalist Congress Party (SP) MP Supriya Sule told reporters that the scheme was a ₹4,800 crore fraud, with 14,000 men benefiting from it. She called for a white paper and a Special Investigation Report (SIT) on the scheme, saying many deserving women had been left out.
In 2025, flawed e-KYC questions wrongly flagged 24 lakh beneficiaries as government employees, halting their instalments, according to the Women and Child Development Department. Technical issues and glitches with the portal have plagued the effective rollout of the scheme so far, with women complaining of OTP failures, Aadhaar-bank linkage errors, and data mismatches.
In July 2025, a verification drive led to the suspension of 26.34 lakh accounts due to irregularities, including multiple claims within the same family, men receiving funds, and beneficiaries availing themselves of dual scheme benefits. Re-verification was subsequently conducted by district collectors. In January 2026, the e-KYC deadline was extended as a ‘last chance’ to rectify errors/OTP issues, until March 31, 2026.
Women speak out
In Mumbai’s Sangamnagar, Radhika, a mother of two, both in their 20s, lost her husband. A clerk, he fell and broke his hip. “We did not have the money to get him operated on,” she says. He eventually died.
The period after his death is a fog for her. When the scheme was announced, a local politician brought tempos with local party workers, who went door-to-door distributing forms for the scheme. Many women said they queued up at these tempos to submit the forms along with their documents.
Radhika was one of them. When she did not get any instalment as other women started getting theirs in their account, she went to her bank to inquire. They asked her to check online. The operator of the cybercafe around her house asked her to visit her bank, saying some KYC documentation was pending. She went repeatedly between the bank and the cybercafe. Each time she had to travel to the nationalised bank, she would have to skip work, the odd jobs she had picked up in the vicinity.
“After several visits, my son asked me not to feel bitter and to give up on it. I still feel there has to be some resolution. But there is no helpline, nobody to guide me,” she says. Now, with a new window for e-KYC opening up, she has filled it online and hopes to be enrolled as a beneficiary.
It is similar for Shakuntala Devi, 55, whose bank account was not linked to her Aadhaar number. Devi stays with her husband, two daughters, and a grand-daughter. She lost her son last year. Her husband is a taxi driver.
“Her account was shut down automatically,” says her 26-year-old daughter Nandini Gautam. “We don’t know if it was because it was inactive. We opened another account and linked it with her Aadhaar, but the record showed that the seeding was inactive. The bank told us to fill up a DBT form. We did it. And yet, she hasn’t got a single instalment as yet.”
Nandini was herself getting instalments till December 2025, when she was asked to do the KYC again. The server issues and website problems did not allow her to complete the KYC process in the stipulated time, she says, adding that she has now completed the process on the phone after the new window opened up.
Pragati Nakti, 22, mother to a baby, used to get her instalments regularly without any problems till June 2025. Then, they stopped. She doesn’t know why. Nothing has changed, she says, adding that the post office where her money used to get deposited, can’t find a reason either. She lives with her brother, parents, and uncle, and is the only woman of the house who has filled the form.
Apart from filling the form online on the portal, many women have also filled up offline forms via Anganwadi sevikas, ASHA workers, and gram sevaks. In fact, a few months ago, the ASHA workers and Anganwadi sevikas refused to shoulder the extra burden of work any more.
Using the funds
Women say the money helps them spend on medicine, on children’s food and education, and on the daily needs of the family. “We don’t have to ask our husbands for money any more. We get our own money. It feels good. But we do not know for how long we will get it. There is always a sense that this will stop any minute,” says Shabnam Abdul Gaffar Shah, a 35-year old mother of five, in Mumbai’s Indiranagar.
The scheme helped buffer the shock of floods in Maharashtra’s Marathwada in 2025. It has helped in the empowerment of women, giving a boost to the rural economy, says Shinde.
He says they garnered this intelligence from the women. “We had formed a helpline to seek responses of women who were the early beneficiaries. It was astounding, the impact the scheme had. Shops started flourishing again. Women were seen to be spending primarily on healthcare, on children’s education, clothing,” he says.
Shinde says that while Madhya Pradesh’s Ladli Behna Yojana was their role model, the government drew inspiration from the success of its own scheme, Shasan Aplya Daari, which translates to government at your doorstep. Under this scheme, the government approached people with its schemes to increase the number of beneficiaries.
“We realised after the analysis of data that very few women were drawing benefits from government schemes. That is when we thought we needed to do something to increase the coverage of women,” he says. At the time, the Opposition had criticised the timing of the scheme, considering it came just before the Maharashtra elections.
As a pilot, the Mukhyamantri Mahila Sashaktikaran Abhiyaan or Chief Minister’s Women Empowerment Drive was launched in two districts of Maharashtra. It was withdrawn almost immediately due to technical issues, but was reintroduced after the government order was modified on October 6, 2023.
“Inspired by its success, we launched the Nari Shaktidoot app. Within one day, 50,000 women registered on it. When we saw that women were aware and interested in schemes, we worked to roll out this scheme in barely three months. After the announcement, 2.47 crore women enrolled themselves. It was a record, and a very satisfying process,” he said.
He added that he had prepared a list of 10 names, and that the then Chief Minister Eknath Shinde had liked and chosen the current name ‘Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana’.
