Andhra Pradesh, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh have discovered some 272,000 fake students who were availing benefits of the mid-day meal (MDM) scheme using Aadhaar authentication and deleted their names from the enrollment rolls, Mint has reported.

According to the daily, Andhra Pradesh has removed names of over 215,000 students from their rolls after an Aadhaar check. Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur have deleted the names of nearly 42,414 and 14,000 students respectively.

The fake students were discovered after the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry decided to link Aadhaar and MDM for better monitoring of the daily school meal programme and reduce wastage.

“We are closely monitoring the situation and hope Aadhaar authentication will give us a better picture of MDM,” secretary of school education in the HRD ministry, Anil Swarup, was quoted by the daily as saying.