The Maharashtra government has removed more than 92 lakh beneficiaries from the Ladki Bahin Yojana after finding them ineligible due to incomplete eKYC (electronic Know Your Customer) or failure to meet the scheme criteria.

The scheme was launched in August 2024 ahead of the state assembly elections. By the time Maharashtra voted that November, more than 2.34 crore women had already received the Rs 1,500 monthly stipend for several months.

The ruling Mahayuti emerged victorious with a 230-seat sweep of the 288-member Assembly. No exit poll had predicted a sweep of this scale. The victory was attributed to the cash handouts to the women.

Shiv Sena spokesperson Krishna Hegde credited the scheme directly for the alliance's higher vote share. A CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey lends some support: 54 per cent of the scheme's beneficiaries voted for the Mahayuti, against 50 per cent of women overall.

Enrolment kept climbing after the election too, reaching its eventual peak of 2.43 crore before verification began cutting it back in September 2025. Since then, the number of beneficiaries has reduced by nearly 38 per cent.

The trigger for this scrutiny was fiscal as much as administrative. Maharashtra's finance department has pegged the state's fiscal deficit at nearly Rs 1.5 lakh crore against a public debt of about Rs 11 lakh crore for 2026-27. The government had to table a Rs 97,706 crore supplementary budget in July 2026 just to keep pace with its committed spending.

The state's Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) had separately flagged close to Rs 3,500 crore of Ladki Bahin's 2024-25 spending as an overrun on its sanctioned budget. Officials now estimate that the women removed from the scheme had already drawn nearly Rs 14,000 crore in stipends before being caught, and that dropping them will save the exchequer upward of Rs 16,500 crore a year going forward.

The scheme's allocation reflects the correction: from about Rs 36,000 crore sanctioned for 2025-26, Ladki Bahin's outlay for 2026-27 has been cut to roughly Rs 26,000 crore, a reduction that aligns with the beneficiary cut.

For a sense of scale, Maharashtra's entire capital expenditure budget for 2026-27 - the money set aside for roads, metros, irrigation, and every other piece of physical infrastructure the state is building - comes to about Rs 1.2 lakh crore. Even after the 92-lakh-name cut, Ladki Bahin's own Rs 26,000 crore allocation is roughly a fifth of that entire capex outlay.

That is a smaller burden than before the verification drive, but a fifth of what Maharashtra spends building its entire physical economy remains a substantial claim on a state simultaneously trying to expand its metro network, expressways, and irrigation systems.

The state's health budget, meanwhile, has been reduced for 2026-27 to about Rs 33,653 crore from Rs 38,454 crore spent in 2025-26. The RBI had already highlighted this tendency in its report State Finances: A Study of Budgets of 2024-25, released in December 2024, when it named farm loan waivers, free electricity, and cash transfers specifically and warned they risked crowding out the capital expenditure states need for roads, schools, and hospitals, calling it "incipient stress."

Nonetheless, the reduction in the number of beneficiaries and the resultant savings is a positive sign for the state's finances. The answer to the question of why ineligible beneficiaries were allowed to infiltrate the lists in the first place is political.

"The government let anyone and everyone in because it was election time when the scheme was announced. It gained a lot through it. But there was a lot of financial pressure on the government, so it knew that it had to act. So, it finally started KYC, and gradually people who were not real beneficiaries were removed," a senior journalist from Maharashtra told Swarajya.

Such realisation has not been confined to Maharashtra. Karnataka's new Chief Minister (CM) D K Shivakumar ordered re-application of every Gruha Lakshmi and Gruha Jyothi beneficiary from scratch with fresh biometric verification, a few days after swearing in.

The order came after the state found more than Rs 100 crore had been paid to dead women and income-tax payers who should never have qualified.

Gruha Lakshmi was one of five "guarantees" the Congress campaigned on ahead of the 2023 Assembly election, promising Rs 2,000 a month to the woman head of every eligible household. Congress won 135 of the assembly's 224 seats, its best performance since 1989, on the back of it.

The disbursal of the payout began in August 2023 with 1.1 crore women, who had enrolled by the end of that month. The number rose to 1.3 crore by April 2026 before Shivakumar announced reapplication in June.

The reapplication and biometric verification are an ongoing process, and it is most likely that, like Maharashtra, Karnataka will also witness a reduction in the number of beneficiaries.

The state's CAG has already flagged the cost of five guarantee schemes in its audit of 2023-24 when it found that they accounted for 15 per cent of Karnataka's revenue expenditure, contributed to a revenue deficit of Rs 9,271 crore, and pushed the state's fiscal deficit from Rs 46,623 crore in 2022-23 to Rs 65,522 crore in 2023-24. Net market borrowing rose to Rs 63,000 crore that year, capital expenditure fell by more than Rs 5,000 crore, and incomplete infrastructure projects climbed 68 per cent, the CAG warned.

However, the government raised its allocation instead, from Rs 16,964 crore for Gruha Lakshmi alone in 2023-24 to Rs 28,608 crore budgeted for 2026-27, with then-CM Siddaramaiah insisting publicly that the guarantees had neither burdened the exchequer nor fueled inflation, even as the CAG's findings on stalled projects and falling capital spending said otherwise.

Jharkhand, which has its own cash handout scheme for women with the name Maiya Samman Yojana, is also struggling under the burden of the scheme. The 2026-27 budget allocates Rs 14,065.57 crore to the scheme, about 12 per cent of the state's entire revenue expenditure, and larger than the state's fiscal deficit of Rs 13,596 crore for the year.

The year before also had similar figures: the scheme cost Rs 13,363 crore against a fiscal deficit of Rs 11,253 crore. In both years, a single welfare scheme's bill has exceeded the amount by which the state government is short.

The scheme was launched in August 2024 at Rs 1,000 a month and then raised to Rs 2,500 from January 2025 onwards as per the ruling JMM-led alliance's promise of doing so if voted back in the November 2024 assembly election. The alliance won 56 seats under CM Hemant Soren.

While the amount was raised, the number of beneficiaries has fallen since then. From 56.61 lakh women beneficiaries in January 2025, the beneficiary count had fallen to 51.04 lakh by October 2025.

A verification drive launched with the new financial year in April 2026 is expected to push the number below 50 lakh, with more than a lakh further names likely to be cut in this round of women who have crossed the scheme's 50-year age limit, families with a government employee or an income-tax payer, and women already drawing a separate state pension.

Unlike routine list updates, the names being removed are not currently being replaced with newly eligible women, so the fall is a net one, per local media reports. The verification process has also stalled payments in several districts, with some women still waiting on their April and May instalments.

The newly elected BJP government in West Bengal is also shortening the beneficiary list. Lakshmir Bhandar, launched by the Mamata Banerjee government in February 2021, paid Rs 1,000 a month at first, rising to Rs 1,500 for general and OBC beneficiaries and Rs 1,700 for SC/ST beneficiaries by early 2026, reaching about 2.3 crore women at an annual cost of roughly Rs 30,000 crore.

The BJP campaigned on raising this payout rather than cutting it, and won its first-ever majority in the state with 208 of 294 seats, ending 15 years of Trinamool rule. Suvendu Adhikari was sworn in as CM on 9 May, inheriting a state debt his own finance minister put at Rs 8.15 lakh crore.

At its first cabinet meeting, the new government cleared Annapurna Bhandar, nearly doubling the monthly payout to Rs 3,000. The budget presented on 22 June allocated Rs 36,000 crore for the scheme in 2026-27, close to what Lakshmir Bhandar cost the previous year, for a payment now worth almost twice as much per head. The state's budget documents show why the arithmetic works: the beneficiary count is projected to fall from 2.4 crore to about 1 crore.

The mechanism is the Special Intensive Revision of Bengal's electoral rolls, carried out ahead of the 2026 election, which sorted voters into categories including Absent, Shifted, Dead, and Duplicate. A Food and Supplies Department order issued in June tied ration card cancellations, and with them, eligibility for Annapurna Bhandar, to that list.

In Delhi, the BJP came to power after promising a monthly handout of Rs 2,500 under the Mahila Samriddhi Yojana. The then-ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had also promised Rs 2,100 and cleared a token Rs 1,000 a month weeks before the vote, but did not pay a single rupee before the election.

AAP's non-delivery left its own promise looking hollow, and made the BJP's version easier to defer without political cost. After coming to power in February 2025, the BJP approved the scheme within days of taking office, but never started the payment.

The scheme was finally launched on 1 August 2026 with Delhi Lakshmi Yojana name, 17 months after the BJP cabinet first cleared it, with the first instalment due on 28 August, Raksha Bandhan. The government expects just over 17 lakh women to benefit, against 71 lakh registered women voters in Delhi, as a number the eligibility conditions were built to produce that.

To qualify, a woman must be 21 to 60 years old, from a family that has lived in Delhi for at least ten years, with an annual family income under Rs 2.5 lakh; only the eldest eligible woman in a household can apply.

Families with more than three children, a government employee, a four-wheeler, an income-tax or GST filing, or annual electricity consumption above 2,400 units are excluded outright, as are women already drawing a government pension or another welfare payment.

Even the payout itself carries a condition none of Maharashtra's, Karnataka's, or Bengal's schemes do: applicants can take the full Rs 2,500 as a straight monthly transfer, or split it between a recurring deposit and a digital rupee wallet, with the deposit portion locked for three years before it is paid out with interest.

Not only states but the Centre has also tried shortening the beneficiary list of some of its welfare schemes. PM-KISAN, the Centre's cash transfer scheme to landholding farmers, peaked at 11.26 crore beneficiaries around its 11th instalment in May 2021.

Mandatory Aadhaar-based payment, land seeding, and e-KYC then cut the rolls to 8.53 crore by early 2022, a fall of 2.73 crore in under a year. The number has since partly recovered, settling at 9.44 crore by the 23rd instalment in June 2026, still 16 per cent below its 2021 peak.

Parliament was told in December 2025 that the Centre had recovered Rs 416.75 crore from beneficiaries who turned out to be income-tax payers, PSU staff, government employees, or holders of constitutional posts - categories the scheme's 2019 notification had excluded.

Similarly, the number of MGNREGA beneficiaries, who actually received employment, peaked at 11.2 crore in 2020-21. The enforcement of the Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS) rollout coincided with mass deletions. The sharpest single year was 2022-23, when 5.19 crore job cards were cancelled, a 247 per cent jump over the 1.49 crore cancelled the year before.

Currently, MGNREGA workers receiving employment are around 8 crore, 28 per cent down from the peak. The expenditure on the scheme is also down from the 2020-21 peak of Rs 1.11 lakh crore to Rs 88,000 crore in 2025-26, a 20 per cent reduction.

But the story is not unidirectional. There are still many states broadening their beneficiary net or raising the handout amount rather than narrowing either.

Madhya Pradesh's Ladli Behna Yojana has held steady at roughly 1.25 crore beneficiaries since its June 2023 launch, with no verification drive resembling Maharashtra's or Karnataka's. Moreover, the monthly handout, which was Rs 1,000 at launch, was raised to Rs 1,250 and then to Rs 1,500 in November 2025.

The state's allocation for the scheme has risen from Rs 18,984 crore in 2024-25 to Rs 23,882 crore for 2026-27, even as Madhya Pradesh's fiscal deficit was 4.5 per cent of GSDP in 2025-26, well above the 3 per cent norm.

Odisha's Subhadra Yojana, launched in September 2024, has moved in the same expansionary direction. Enrolment has grown from about 1.07 crore at launch to over 1.12 crore by its fourth instalment in March 2026, with the state periodically reopening the application portal to admit women newly turning 21.

Odisha can afford that, since its fiscal deficit sits at around 3.2 per cent of GSDP for 2025-26, comfortably within the FRBM norm, alongside a revenue surplus of roughly 3 per cent of GSDP.

But other fiscally burdened states need to find a way out like Maharashtra did. The state budgeted the Ladki Bahin scheme at nearly Rs 46,000 crore in its first year, but with a shortened beneficiary list, now pays roughly half of that.

The state has also to save money in another way. The Mahayuti's campaign promised to raise the monthly payout from Rs 1,500 to Rs 2,100, but it has gone unmet through two full budgets since. CM Devendra Fadnavis has said at both that it will happen once fiscal balance is achieved, a condition with no date attached.

With Assembly polls due again by 2029 and with the Rs 2,100 promise still unfulfilled, the pressure to fulfil it will mount as the election nears. The Fadnavis government will likely play the payout hike card close to the vote, rather than raising the payout early.

Till then, Fadnavis is holding the line and trying to reduce the fiscal burden as much as possible. More states will come to the same realisation Fadnavis has and will try to find similar ways out.

The shortlisting will be quieter than the hyped up announcements because no government can go back on the promise that helped it come to power. The fine print is how it keeps that promise while paying for fewer people than it once did.