The Karnataka women and child development department is preparing to begin a verification drive covering 6.72 lakh Gruha Lakshmi beneficiaries mapped in Mysuru district, with the exercise aimed at identifying ineligible recipients and ensuring that payments reach the intended households.
The drive is expected to begin after the special intensive revision of electoral rolls concludes. Congress MLC Dinesh Guligowda, vice-president of the Karnataka State Guarantee Schemes Implementation Authority, said the verification exercise would start after the electoral-roll revision was completed.
The department plans to deploy enumerators to visit beneficiaries’ households and check their details using a dedicated form introduced for the exercise. ASHA and anganwadi workers are expected to assist because of their familiarity with households and beneficiaries at the grassroots level.
Eligibility checks are expected to include whether beneficiaries have voting rights in Karnataka. The exercise follows other verification measures linked to the state’s guarantee schemes, including the verification of Gruha Jyothi beneficiaries and a survey to identify deceased beneficiaries enrolled under Gruha Lakshmi.
In Mysuru district, the women and child development department is working with banks to recover payments that were made to deceased beneficiaries, according to the report. The proposed exercise is also expected to change how financial assistance is transferred. Payments would be made only to bank branches located within Karnataka, while transfers to loan accounts would not be permitted, sources in the department said.
The implementation plan has raised concerns among ASHA workers, who have said that beneficiary verification is outside their assigned responsibilities. Sandhya PS, a representative of the ASHA Workers’ Federation, said workers had been asked to attend training for the exercise but had not participated because government agencies still owed them money for involvement in earlier exercises.
The dispute places the proposed verification drive within a larger administrative challenge: welfare delivery depends not only on beneficiary databases and bank transfers, but also on frontline workers who are often asked to support surveys and verification exercises. The department’s plan relies on their local knowledge, while the workers’ federation has questioned the responsibility and payment arrangements attached to the assignment.
The department has not indicated in the supplied report how long the verification will take or when revised payments will begin. The next step is the launch of the household-level exercise after the electoral-roll revision concludes, with officials expected to verify beneficiary details and determine eligibility under the scheme’s requirements.
