Driven by the intent to ensure its victory in the Assembly elections, the ruling Maharashtra government promised during election campaign not just the continuance of its Laadki Bahin Yojana – a monthly stipend of Rs 1,500 – but an increment to Rs 2,100. Now it is caught up in its own fiscal carelessness and stands exposed for not doing the due diligence. If anything, the government should be embarrassed that the scheme has been riddled by fraud leading to a loss of Rs 3,951 crore.
Fortunately, instead of merely continuing with the much lauded scheme and ‘a sure-shot election winner’, the government began to look inwards and started to ferret out information. The least that can be said is that once the findings emerged, long suspected by the administration officials as potential fraud, the women welfare department was shell shocked. Too many wrong hands dipped in the till and the cash-strapped government was at a loss to explain.
Fraud by non-beneficiaries
The fraud, however, is not that of government or its personnel. It has been by those who were not entitled but claimed the stipend regardless. The ineligible can be categorized into three kinds. In a scheme to support women between the ages of 21 and 65 years, those who wrongfully received the stipend are over 14,000 men, nearly 10,000 women employees of the government, and over 1,200 retired women who were receiving pensions. Anybody who could, just dipped the hand in the till.
Official word is that the 14,000-odd men who impersonated women by false declarations, have walked away with at least Rs. 21.44 cr. This mischief was detected ten months after the launch of the scheme. The 26.34 lakh ineligible women have had their stipends suspended as of last month. Would the government be able to take steps under criminal laws or be content to recover the money and be content with? It is not clear; the intra-government consultations are yet to start.
Recovering lost money not possible
By eliminating the wrongful beneficiaries, the holes can be plugged but not recovering the money taken away by misrepresentation would only weaken the authority of the government. The government had taken the help of the Income Tax department to identify those who were paying income tax because the income limit to receive the stipend was Rs. 2.5 lakh per annum. A family income of Rs. 2.5 lakh is much below the cutoff at which people are liable to pay income tax.
In this fashion, the Maharashtra government has lost a whopping Rs. 3,951 crore because of false claims and manipulation of the registration system. A total of 26.34 lakh wrongful or ineligible people have been identified. This number includes those who made multiple claims but how that happened is yet to be explained. What is more, the government has not yet formulated the method by which this Rs. 3,951 crore is going to be recovered.
It is common knowledge that the government then led by Eknath Shinde rode the electoral wave favouring the three-party alliance of Shinde’s breakaway Shiv Sena, the breakaway Nationalist Congress Party, and the Bhartiya Janata Party. In fact, not only had they confirmed during the election campaign the continuation of the stipend scheme but announced that it would be hiked to RS 2,100 per month. For a poor family, it was a sum to clutch at and women and as voters, they helped the parties.
No money to keep promise
Though the promise was for hiking it to Rs 2,100 per month was to be “soon after the elections”, and Ajit Pawar, who has been a long serving finance minister, had claimed that as “finance minister I know Maharashtra government is financially sound.” Government after government, not just the present Mahayuti government, have been digging themselves deeper into the financial hole. The reality is it has not found the money to keep that promise.
There is, however, nary a whisper about how the long-lost prudence would return. Such profligacy – limited in meaning to being unable to match the revenue to expenditure – has resulted in seeking supplementary demands soon after every budget. For 2025-26, the highest ever demand of Rs 57,509 crore was made. In the previous financial year, it was Rs 6,480 cr. It has to be noted that the state has a debt burden of Rs. One lakh crore, with an estimated interest payment of Rs, 40,000 crore annually as of now.
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