Pune: Around 2.5 lakh beneficiaries of the Ladki Bahin scheme in Pune district were wrongly classified as belonging to families of govt employees due to an error in the e-KYC, which led to a halt in their monthly financial assistance of Rs1,500, officials said. Statewide, the women and child development (WCD) department has identified 24 lakh such affected women.A Pune district official told TOI on Tuesday about 6,000 anganwadi workers were assigned the task of physically verifying these 2.5 lakh beneficiaries. As many as 4,395 workers will cover rural areas, while 1,600 workers have been deployed in urban pockets.“They will visit homes, check e-KYC details, fill out verification forms, and submit reports. These will be scrutinised by district WCD department officials before being sent to the state govt, after which payments will be restored,” the official said.Beneficiaries, however, fear the process will further delay payments. “If the portal was opened, we could correct the mistake ourselves. Now, the anganwadi worker will visit, collect documents, submit a report, and then wait for approvals. I have not received payments for three-four months, and this process may take longer,” said a woman from Paud.A WCD department official said the problem stemmed from a poorly worded question in the Marathi e-KYC form, which used a confusing double negative — “Tumchya gharatle koni sarkari nokrit nahi na?” (Nobody in your family works for the govt, right?). “Many beneficiaries who should have answered ‘no’ mistakenly marked ‘yes’. The system interpreted this as a govt employee being present in the family and automatically stopped the payments,” the official said.Officials said the scale of the error became evident during data scrutiny, pointing out that Maharashtra has only eight to nine lakh govt and semi-govt employees. The department acknowledged the error and launched a statewide physical verification drive involving nearly one lakh anganwadi workers to rectify beneficiary records.State women and child development minister Aditi Tatkare, in a post on X on Jan 20, said anganwadi workers would carry out door-to-door verification to correct entries and restore payments to eligible women.The department also launched a helpline (181) last week to address grievances, but beneficiaries complained that calls often did not connect or failed to offer clear solutions.
