“You must have made a mistake. You probably didn’t fill out the form properly, so I didn’t get the money," Imran's mother Aklima Bibi keeps telling him.
The 27-year-old is repeatedly reprimanded by his mother because the Rs 3,000 promised under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led West Bengal government’s Annapurna Bhandar Scheme has still not been credited to her bank account. Imran and his family live in Bhangar on the outskirts of Kolkata. Aklima cooks mid-day meals at a local government high school, and her husband is a vegetable-seller.
“I filled out the Annapurna Bhandar form for my mother in June, but the portal still shows her application as ‘under processing’,” Imran tells The Quint. “Nobody around my house has received the money. But since one of my aunts has got it, my mother suspects that I must have done something wrong.”
In Howrah’s Andul, 46-year-old homemaker Pompa Mondal, too, is left waiting. Her application remains “under processing”—and she has received no money.