Daijiworld Media Network - Mangaluru

Mangaluru, June 7: A large-scale verification drive under the state government’s Gruhalakshmi scheme — one of Karnataka’s five guarantee programmes — has led to the removal of 9,251 deceased beneficiaries’ names in Dakshina Kannada district so far.

Under the scheme, Rs 2,000 is credited every month to the head of each household. Since its launch in August 2023, as many as 3.82 lac women had registered in the district. However, officials later discovered that payments were continuing to be deposited into the accounts of some deceased beneficiaries. To plug this lapse, the Department of Women and Child Development has intensified a verification exercise to identify and remove deceased recipients from the rolls.

Officials said the exercise is also covering cases where eligible beneficiaries had not linked their Aadhaar numbers to their bank accounts, and such names are being mapped and brought into the scheme.

At present, mapping work is under way for 293 applications. Around 9,200 applications were rejected at the initial stage as the applicants were income tax payers or GST registrants.

The department said that once a beneficiary dies, her name is deleted after the family submits a death certificate, which is verified through the e-Janma system. However, in several cases, families have not obtained or submitted death certificates, leaving some cases pending verification.

To address gaps, officials are also relying on local anganwadi workers to collect field-level information, ensuring that payments are not wrongly credited to deceased beneficiaries and preventing misuse of public funds under the scheme.

At the taluk level, Mangaluru recorded the highest number of deletions with 1,996 deceased beneficiaries removed from the list. Bantwal followed with 1,910 deletions, while Moodbidri reported 507 cases of deceased beneficiaries being struck off the scheme, officials said.