Durgavati’s son Rampal with his grandson. Picture by Ritesh Yadav Tapas Chakraborty

Karanpur (Lucknow), Nov. 16: Durgavati did exist and her real name — believe it or not — was Kalavati, which should ring a loud bell for Rahul Gandhi.

The search for the mother who “officially” delivered 52 babies in 2009 took The Telegraph today to a house the Congress’s fact-finders had missed in Karanpur on the outskirts of Lucknow.

There lived till last year Kalavati, aka Durgavati, who seems to have unwittingly provided the framework on which racketeers built the stupendous tale of 52 deliveries a year and siphoned off over Rs 72,000 from a central scheme — Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) — meant to prevent maternal and neonatal deaths. The scam is said to have run into crores and a CBI probe has been ordered.

Although named Kalavati, she was known as Durgavati because her parents used to call her Durga when was young. The name Durgavati got into official records probably because she had gone for a cataract operation under another central scheme in 2008. A year later, the scamsters seemed to have copied her name from the eye care register, deliberately or erroneously changing her husband’s name to Mohan Ram from Mohan Lal.

But the scamsters left out one detail: Durgavati turned 75 in 2009, the year she is supposed to have delivered a baby a week. She was also a widow by then.

Durgavati died a year later in August 2010, unaware that her name had been dragged into a racket that exemplifies the last-mile holes in the country’s welfare delivery system.

A year on, her story emerged from the shadows when Rahul Gandhi referred to her during his speech at Phulpur, the one-time constituency of Jawaharlal Nehru, in Uttar Pradesh.

Had Rahul known about her real name — Kalavati the coincidence would not have escaped him. Kalavati Bandurkar was one of the two Vidarbha farm widows who were mentioned by Rahul during a July 2008 parliamentary debate.

A resident of Jalka village in Yavatmal district, the epicentre of the Vidarbha cotton farm crisis in 2006-2007, Kalavati had met Rahul when he toured Vidarbha days before the House debate. The mother of seven daughters and two sons had lost her husband Parshuram when he committed suicide because of mounting debts.

A lady with the same name has now been cited by an unknowing Rahul to shine a light on the racket.

Two Congress leaders who visited Karanpur this year after they accessed details of Durgavati using the right to information law had reported back that no woman in that name existed. The conclusion was technically correct because Durgavati had died by then.

“When our members visited the village, it was found that no woman called Durgavati existed. Since the name was fake, we did not go into details,” said S.J.S. Makkar, the chairman of the right to information task force of the Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee.

“There is no one in the village called Durgavati. The only woman who was closer to this name and one who lived in the village was Kalavati. She was wife of Mohan Lal. Some people used to call her Durgavati after her nickname Durga,” said Kedar Singh, the gram pradhan.

“I am using the past tense in her case as both she and her husband are dead now,” Singh added.

The leafy Karanpur houses 1,587 people belonging to 281 families, of which over 200 belong to weaker sections.

So, how many children did Durgavati, credited with 52 in official records, deliver?

Four, two sons and two daughters.

Rampal, the eldest who looks older than his 48 years, said: “My mother died in August 2009 and father in October 2005. There was no question of my mother getting any benefit from the scheme as this was not introduced when she last became a mother.”