Applicants for the Delhi government’s ₹2,500 per month cash payout scheme for women will have to submit a letter of recommendation from the Member of Parliament (MP) or Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) of their constituency, documents reviewed by HT show.
Event Context
This requirement, coming on top of other restrictive eligibility criteria, may whittle down the potential pool of beneficiaries of the Delhi Lakshmi Yojana scheme from the 1.7 million initially estimated by the state government. For the record, Delhi has 70 MLAs, including 48 from the BJP and the rest from the Aam Aadmi Party, and seven MPs, who will have to sign these letters of recommendation.
“The government earlier had the same requirement for the widow pension scheme, but it was later removed,” an official said on condition of anonymity.
To scrutinise applications, the government created a three-tiered process, according to documents seen by HT. First, the District Project Management Unit will verify fields and documents to check whether an application is complete or incomplete. Second, the District Women and Child Development Officer will either recommend or not recommend it for further processing. Finally, the District Level Approval, Monitoring and Grievance Redressal Committee (DLAMGRC) will review the recommended applications or send them back to the applicant with a response.
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Besides women already receiving financial assistance or pension under any other government scheme, those who pay income tax, file GST returns, are government employees, or belong to families with members employed by the Centre, state governments, public sector undertakings or other government organisations will be ineligible, according to the cabinet note approved on Tuesday.
Also Read: Delhi Lakshmi Yojana: Criminal past, owning 4-wheeler can make women ineligible for ₹2.5k aid
Additionally, families owning a four-wheeler, annual household electricity consumption exceeding 2,400 units and women with a criminal record will also be excluded.
The government has earmarked ₹5,110 crore in the 2026-27 Budget for the scheme. Women who opt for the government’s preferred payment model will receive ₹2,500 every month, with ₹1,500 deposited into a recurring deposit (RD) or fixed deposit (FD) and the remaining ₹1,000 credited to a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) wallet. The wallet cannot be used to purchase liquor, paan, gutka, cigarettes, bidis and other intoxicants or for online gaming and gambling.
Separately, an order issued by the Department of Women and Child Development on Thursday directed district officers to coordinate with district magistrates to organise beneficiary registration programmes on August 1 and identify at least 100 eligible beneficiaries from every district. The order instructed officers to mobilise eligible women through anganwadi workers and other field staff, ensure that only applicants possessing all prescribed documents are brought for registration, to complete application forms before uploading them to the portal, and coordinate with MPs and MLAs wherever required.
Team Analysis
“The scheme appears to be a dole for targeted and specific category of women who need to have access to recommendations of MP, MLA which is a very restrictive way of giving approvals,” said Paras Tyagi, lawyer and founder and president of the Centre for Youth Culture Law and Environment (CYCLE).
“All MLAs from any political party can verify the documents. This is how most state welfare schemes have always worked and there are no feasibility concerns that we can find in this implementation mechanism,” said home minister Ashish Sood.
Also Read: 15% women may lose out on Delhi’s monthly payout scheme due to 3-child cap
Other mandatory documents for applications include Aadhaar card, voter ID card, photograph and signature, along with one residence proof and one age proof document.
The scheme entails a payout of Rs2500 per month to the eldest woman between the age of 21 and 60 from a household whose total annual income is under ₹2.50 lakh. A beneficiary, or her husband or parents, must have been residents of Delhi for at least 10 years.
Women with more than that three children will not be eligible for the scheme, guidelines revealed after the scheme was approved by the Cabinet on Tuesday showed. This would exclude 15% of women from the lowest income strata of Delhi’s households, an analysis by HT found.
Paras Tyagi, lawyer and founder and president of the Centre for Youth Culture Law and Environment (CYCLE), said, “The scheme appears to be a dole for targeted and specific category of women who need to have access to recommendations of MP, MLA which is a very restrictive way of giving approvals. If GNCTD is confident about the scheme then why the mandatory proactive disclosure of legislative and administrative records behind the scheme are not made public. It is a violation of Section 4 of the RTI Act.”
Match Outlook
Another official said the application forms will have a section that will have to be signed by the local MP/ MLA and that this clause was incorporated to ensure transparency and involve the public representatives. “Once the public representatives will be involved, they will also ensure that the credentials of beneficiaries are duly checked. The onus will also be on them,” this official said.
