The SanvaadGarh | Ground Report from Latehar, Jharkhand
She walks kilometers to the panchayat office each month, clutching her Aadhaar card and a worn bank passbook. Yet, a 67-year-old widow from Latehar district returns empty-handed. Her ₹1,000 widow pension, promised under the Indira Gandhi National Widow Pension Scheme (IGNWPS), has been delayed for months, with officials citing Aadhaar mismatch issues. Hunger doesn’t wait for bureaucracy.
Across Jharkhand’s tribal heartland, Aadhaar—once touted as empowerment—has become a barrier strangling the elderly, disabled, and widowed women. SanvaadGarh is investigating pension disbursement failures across Latehar, Palamu, and Garhwa, and the early findings are alarming.
The Pension Breakdown: A Growing Crisis
Tens of thousands of elderly and widow pensioners across Jharkhand, including many in Latehar, face persistent delays, based on trends from the Social Welfare Department (June 2025 data pending validation via RTI). Issues include:
- Aadhaar-bank linking failures
- Biometric authentication errors
- Failed Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) transactions with no alerts
SanvaadGarh has filed RTIs to confirm the scale, but the pattern of exclusion is clear.
What SanvaadGarh Found on the Ground
Our team visited 6 panchayats in Latehar and Mahuadanr blocks. Preliminary findings reveal:
- Panchayat offices lack Aadhaar updation centers, forcing women to travel 30–40 km for biometric re-verification.
- Grievance redressal helplines are consistently non-functional.
- No monthly public pension rosters are displayed, violating Right to Information mandates.
- Middlemen charge ₹100–₹150 per correction form or passbook update, a trend reported anecdotally.
A widow shared: “मेरे पति की मौत के बाद जो ₹1000 आता था, उसी से मैं दवा और राशन चलाती थी। अब वो भी नहीं है। सरकार कहती है सिस्टम दुरुस्त है — भूखा पेट क्या सिस्टम समझे?” (After my husband’s death, I managed medicine and rations with that ₹1,000. Now it’s gone. The government claims the system works—what does a hungry stomach understand of it?)
The Broken Digital Infrastructure
The e-Kuber platform, used for fund transfers, suffers transaction failures without notifying beneficiaries. Biometric mismatches, common among the elderly or ill, are rejected due to ignored manual override protocols. State-level dashboards falsely report “successfully disbursed” status even when funds don’t reach accounts. This is a failure of intent, not just technology.
SanvaadGarh Demands
- Immediate manual pension disbursal to all pending beneficiaries.
- Offline enrollment and grievance redress camps in every affected block.
- Penalties and FIRs against middlemen charging illegal fees.
- A public dashboard with real-time payment status, Aadhaar link status, and grievance disposal timelines.
- A legislated pension rights law, not a scheme reliant on annual budgets.
If the government can send ₹8,000 crore in LPG subsidies digitally, why can’t it ensure ₹1,000 reaches a starving widow in Latehar? This is apathy by design.
This investigation is based on ground observations and public data, with unverified details pending RTI confirmation. We invite the Jharkhand Social Welfare Department to respond.
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