Maharashtra’s Ladki Bahin Scheme Under Scrutiny After CAG Flags ₹3,541 Crore Overspending, 95 Lakh Beneficiaries Removed

When the Maharashtra government launched the Ladki Bahin Yojana, it looked like a massive political triumph. Promising ₹1,500 every single month to over two crore women across the state was a brilliant, headline-grabbing vow. But just a few months in, the entire setup has completely fallen apart behind the scenes.

What is happening right now isn't some routine administrative update. It is a story of sheer panic at the very top of the government, and the whole crisis plays out like two sides of the exact same coin. At the heart of this panic are two staggering numbers that reveal just how out of control things became.

On one side of the coin, you have a state treasury in absolute chaos. The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) just blew the whistle on the scheme's finances, and the numbers are terrifying. The department in charge did not just make a bad guess; they completely lost control of the purse strings, burning through ₹33,237 crore.

That total includes ₹3,541 crore in entirely unauthorized overspending—money they legally did not have, spent without any legislative approval or explanation. The government's panic here is obvious. To keep the cash flowing before the public noticed the mistake, they cannibalized the state’s future. They aggressively slashed budgets for long-term essentials like public housing and clean water. They even tried to mask the disaster by quietly parking over ₹15,586 crore in temporary side-accounts just to make the state's overall deficit look better on paper. The auditor’s message was blunt: the treasury was breaking.

Flip the coin over, and you see the direct, brutal consequence of that warning. The government realized they were physically running out of money, panicked, and had to slam on the brakes immediately.

They launched a ruthless "verification drive" that did not just trim the edges—it took an ax to the list. Out of an initial pool of 2.43 crore beneficiaries, a staggering 95 lakh women were abruptly deleted. Let that number sink in. Nearly 40% of the entire program was wiped out in a single sweep.

This is where the panic hit the ground. Nowhere felt the sting worse than Beed district, which saw over 2.8 lakh deletions alone. The state used rigid electronic eKYC deadlines and sudden database cross-checks like an emergency release valve to disqualify people as quickly as possible. Over 62 lakh women were thrown off the list simply because they could not navigate the digital verification rules in time. Another 12 to 16 lakh families were purged for crossing the income cap, alongside a mix of system overlaps and even thousands of men caught trying to scam the system for a quick payout.

The government is trying to spin this mass eviction as standard "data cleaning" to remove ghost accounts and save the taxpayers money. The opposition is screaming that the state has simply gone broke.

But when you connect both sides of the coin, the truth is clear. You do not accidentally enroll 95 lakh ineligible people. The state wrote a political check it could not cash, panicked when the auditors caught them illegally overspending by ₹3,541 crore, and used a massive, cold-hearted purge of 95 lakh women to balance the books.