RAdhika Kamble, 49, boils with anger every time someone mentions the Ladki Bahin Yojana, a welfare initiative targeted at women in Maharashtra. She feels cheated as she is yet to become a beneficiary even after two years of the scheme being announced. The process was too difficult for a widow looking after the household and there was no help, she says.
But that was not what made her feel insecure. Within a few months of her husband’s death, she was asked to take a photograph 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 as much. We need it the most. The government will understand after seeing our photographs, as we were told,” she says. She chokes on her emotions. Sitting in a small, airless room in Mumbai’s Sangamnagar, she looks at the documents and her photograph again and again. Disappointed, she says, “Maybe money is not written in my destiny.”
disturbances and headaches
According to the policy document, 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 the economic independence of women, improve their health and nutrition and strengthen their decisive role in the family.”
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 annual income of the family had to be less than ₹2.5 lakh.
The Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana – translated as the Chief Minister’s ‘My Favorite Sister’ scheme – was based on a similar scheme in Madhya Pradesh, and was expected to cost the government Rs 46,000 crore annually.
The government introduced the terms and conditions for the scheme. Women who had a family member in a government job, or belonged to families that paid taxes, or belonged to families that owned a car were not eligible. There was a limit of two women per family who could receive cash benefits. Those who were getting similar amount of money from other government schemes were also not eligible.
Amol Shinde, who headed the CM Welfare Cell when the scheme was launched in the previous Eknath Shinde government, says, in July, the first month of the scheme being launched, 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 get Know Your Customer (KYC) done, so that they can avail the benefits of money. In the second month of September, about 2.6 crore women were registered. Shinde says that scrutiny of applications started and only 2.4 crore got the benefit. The government later introduced another condition requiring women to complete e-KYC verification, after which the number of beneficiaries started declining. The number of beneficiaries in December 2025 was 1.57 crore.
Women tie Rakhi to the then Maharashtra Chief Minister 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 despite all the documents being complete, the payment came for several months and then stopped. Some beneficiaries are still struggling to link their Aadhaar numbers to their bank accounts through the online system, which often requires external assistance to fill the necessary forms.
The opposition in Maharashtra has targeted the government over the reduction in the number of beneficiaries and the financial pressure on the state exchequer due to the scheme. It accuses the government of diverting funds from other welfare schemes to continue benefits under Majhi Ladki Bahin.
In June 2025, Nationalist Congress Party (SP) MP Supriya Sule told reporters that the scheme was a fraud of ₹4,800 crore, which benefited 14,000 people. She demanded a white paper and a special investigation report (SIT) on the scheme, saying many eligible women have been left out.
According to the Women and Child Development Department, in 2025, flawed e-KYC questions wrongly marked 24 lakh beneficiaries as government employees, leading to stalling of their installments. Technical issues and glitches with the portal have so far affected the effective implementation of the scheme, 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 dual schemes. Later re-verification was done by the district collectors. In January 2026, the e-KYC deadline was extended to March 31, 2026 as a ‘last chance’ to rectify the errors/OTP issues.
women speak
In Mumbai’s Sangamnagar, Radhika, a mother of two, in her 20s, lost her husband. A clerk, he fell and broke his hip. She says, “We didn’t have the money to operate on him.” Ultimately he died.
The time after his death is a fog for them. When the scheme was announced, a local politician came with a tempo along with local party workers, who were going door-to-door distributing forms of the scheme. Many women said they were standing in queues at these tempos to submit forms along with their documents.
Radhika was one of them. When installments started coming into the accounts of other women, she did not get any installment, so she went to her bank and inquired. He asked him to check online. The operator of the cyber café near his house asked him to go to his bank, saying that some KYC documents were pending. She kept hopping between the bank and the cyber café again and again. Every time he had to go to the nationalized bank, he had to leave work, doing the odd jobs around that he could find.
She says, “After several meetings, my son asked me not to feel bitter and to leave it. I still feel there must be some solution. But there is no helpline, no one to guide me.” Now, with a new window opening for e-KYC, she has filled it online and hopes to be enrolled as a beneficiary.
It is the same for 55-year-old Shakuntala Devi, whose bank account was not linked to her Aadhaar number. Devi lives with her husband, two daughters and a granddaughter. He lost his son last year. Her husband is a taxi driver.
“His account got closed automatically,” says his daughter Nandini Gautam, 26. “We don’t know if it was because it was dormant. We opened another account and linked it to his Aadhaar, but the records showed that the seeding was dormant. The bank asked us to fill a DBT form. We did so. And yet, he has not received a single installment yet.”
Nandini herself was taking installments till December 2025, when she was asked to get her KYC done again. Server issues and website issues did not allow her to complete the KYC process in the stipulated time, she says, adding that she has now completed the process over the phone as it opens new window.
Pragati Nakati, 22, a mother of one, continued to receive installments regularly without any problem till June 2025. Then, they stopped. She doesn’t know why. Nothing has changed, she says, and the post office where her money was deposited is also unable to find a reason for it. She lives with her brother, parents and uncle and is the only woman in the house who has filled the form.
Apart from filling online forms on the portal, many women have also filled offline forms through Anganwadi. MaidsASHA workers, and Gram Sevaks. Actually, a few months ago Asha workers and Anganwadi Maids Refused to take on additional workload.
access funds
Women say this money helps them spend on medicine, food and education of children and daily needs of the family. “Now we don’t need to ask for money from our husbands. We get our money. It feels good. But we don’t know for how long we will get it. There is always a feeling that it will stop at any moment,” says Shabnam Abdul Ghaffar Shah, 35, a mother of five in Mumbai’s Indiranagar.
The scheme helped in reducing the shock of floods in Marathwada, Maharashtra in 2025. This, says Shinde, has helped in the empowerment of women, thereby boosting the rural economy.
He says that he got this information from women. “We set up a helpline to gather feedback from women who were the initial beneficiaries. It was amazing that the scheme had an impact. Shops started thriving again. Women were seen spending mainly on health care, children’s education, clothing,” he says.
Shinde says that while Madhya Pradesh’s Ladli Behna scheme was his role model, the government took inspiration from the success of its own scheme Shasan Apply Dari, which means government at your doorstep. Under this scheme the government contacted the people with its schemes to increase the number of beneficiaries.
“After analyzing the data, we realized that very few women were benefiting from government schemes. That’s when we thought we needed to do something to increase the coverage of women,” he says. At the time, the opposition had criticized the timing of the plan, noting that it came just before the Maharashtra elections.
As a pilot, the Chief Minister Mahila Sashaktikaran Abhiyan or Chief Minister Women Empowerment Campaign was launched in two districts of Maharashtra. It was almost immediately withdrawn due to technical issues, but was reimplemented after a government order was amended on October 6, 2023.
“Inspired by its success, we launched the Nari Shaktidoot app. Within a day, 50,000 women registered on it. When we saw that women were aware and interested in the schemes, we worked to launch the 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 said that he had prepared a list of 10 names and the then Chief Minister Eknath Shinde liked it and he chose the present name ‘Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana’.
