10 Crore Fake Beneficiaries Axed: A Clean-Up Raises Questions The Modi government may have been beating the drum of weeding out nearly 10 crore fake beneficiaries from welfare rolls, saving the exchequer about ₹4.3 lakh crore. It credited the JAM trinity—Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, and Mobile—for plugging leakages in schemes such as ration cards, LPG subsidies, and scholarships. The government said these “non-existent” names were routinely used under previous regimes to funnel money to middlemen. “Imagine theft of ₹4.3 lakh crore. That money is now being used for the development of the country.”The government has claimed this ahead of a fresh Aadhaar-based verification drive across central schemes including PM-Kisan, Ujjwala Yojna and PDS, to be completed by December 2025. Officials say the data will feed into the next Finance Commission cycle in April 2026, shaping how central funds are allocated to states. Ministries have also been asked to “tweak” eligibility criteria if verification reveals redundancy.Government figures highlight anomalies: in FY25, 2.2 crore ration cardholders did not collect free grains for up to a year, suggesting migration, reduced need, or ghost entries. Direct benefit transfers (DBT) have meanwhile ballooned from just over ₹7,000 crore in 2014 to ₹6.83 lakh crore in FY25, a rise the Centre attributes to digital reform.Yet the scale of savings is difficult to verify. Critics note the ₹4.3 lakh crore figure reflects notional leakages, not actual recoveries from fake beneficiaries, and warn genuine but inactive households could be excluded in the purge. States, which co-administer welfare schemes, may also resist tighter central control through Aadhaar-enabled payment systems. For the government, however, the narrative is clear: Modi has framed the exercise as proof of cleaning up systemic corruption, even as the politics of welfare delivery deepens in the run-up to 2025 &  2026 poll season.