Enrolment in India’s flagship maternity benefit scheme fell from 6.2 million (62 lakh) beneficiaries in the 2022-23 financial year to 2.3 million (23 lakh) by October in 2025-26. Digital verification rules introduced under the Poshan 2.0 nutrition mission and the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana, known as PMMVY, are a central reason. Field research across Madhya Pradesh and Bihar found that mandatory Aadhaar biometric enrolment and facial recognition checks are pushing poor, digitally-illiterate pregnant and lactating women out of programmes designed to protect them.
The schemes exist to support maternal nutrition during pregnancy and early childhood, a period when nutritional gaps carry lasting consequences. PMMVY provides cash incentives to pregnant and lactating women, while Poshan 2.0 delivers supplementary nutrition and health tracking through anganwadi centres, India’s rural childcare and nutrition network. Both now require identity verification steps that assume reliable internet access, working biometric scanners and a degree of digital familiarity many rural applicants simply do not have.
Women turned away at the point of registration
Investigators documented women being turned away at registration because their fingerprints failed to match stored records, a common problem among manual labourers whose fingerprints wear down over years of physical work. Facial recognition software struggled similarly, particularly where lighting or camera quality at rural centres was poor. Applicants without existing Aadhaar numbers, or whose Aadhaar details did not precisely match other identity documents, faced repeated rejections rather than a straightforward path to correction.
Anganwadi workers, who are meant to guide women through enrolment and verification, are themselves stretched thin. There are 213,000 (2.13 lakh) vacant anganwadi worker posts nationally, leaving many centres without staff able to troubleshoot technical failures or travel to remote households. Women in areas with limited mobile network coverage described making repeated journeys to enrolment centres, often at the cost of a day’s wage, only to be told the system was not working.
A comparable pattern beyond these two states
The exclusion pattern is not confined to Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. A separate investigation in Gujarat found around 150,000 (1.5 lakh) women facing similar Aadhaar-related obstacles to receiving PMMVY maternity payments, according to Vibes of India. That state-specific finding, reported independently of the Madhya Pradesh and Bihar research, points to a structural problem in how the verification requirement was designed rather than a series of isolated local failures.
Policy analysts who reviewed the enrolment data argue that digital verification, intended to reduce fraud and duplicate claims, has instead introduced a new barrier that falls hardest on the women the schemes were built to reach. Pregnant women in remote or low-connectivity districts are disproportionately affected, since they face the greatest distance to functioning enrolment infrastructure and the least support when it fails.
Government officials have previously defended Aadhaar-linked verification as necessary to prevent leakage of welfare payments and ensure benefits reach genuine recipients. The enrolment figures, however, suggest the current system is filtering out eligible applicants alongside any fraudulent claims, without a clear mechanism to distinguish between the two.
Nutrition and health policy in South Asia has drawn wider attention this week, including separate discussion of dietary approaches to heart health around World Heart Day. For PMMVY and Poshan 2.0, the immediate question is narrower and more urgent: whether verification systems can be redesigned before enrolment among the region’s poorest mothers falls any further.
