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https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/1/25/in-india-an-algorithm-declares-them-dead-they-have-to-prove-theyre>
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Rohtak and New Delhi, India: Dhuli Chand was 102 years old on September 8,
2022, when he led a wedding procession in Rohtak, a district town in the north
Indian state of Haryana.
As is customary in north Indian weddings, he sat on a chariot in his wedding
finery, wearing garlands of Indian rupee notes, while a band played celebratory
music and family members and villagers accompanied him.
But instead of a bride, Chand was on his way to meet government officials.
Chand resorted to the antic to prove to officials that he was not only alive
but also lively. A placard he held proclaimed, in the local dialect: “thara
foofa zinda hai”, which literally translates to “your uncle is alive”.
Six months prior, his monthly pension was suddenly stopped because he was
declared “dead” in government records.
Under Haryana’s Old Age Samman Allowance scheme, people aged 60 years and
above, whose income together with that of their spouse doesn’t exceed 300,000
rupees ($3,600) per annum, are eligible for a monthly pension of 2,750 rupees
($33).
In June 2020, the state started using a newly built algorithmic system – the
Family Identity Data Repository or the Parivar Pehchan Patra (PPP) database –
to determine the eligibility of welfare claimants.
The PPP is an eight-digit unique ID provided to each family in the state and
has details of birth and death, marriage, employment, property, and income tax,
among other data, of the family members. It maps every family’s demographic and
socioeconomic information by linking several government databases to check
their eligibility for welfare schemes.
The state said that the PPP created “authentic, verified and reliable data of
all families”, and made it mandatory for citizens to access all welfare
schemes.
But in practice, the PPP wrongly marked Chand as “dead”, denying him his
pension for several months. Worse, the authorities did not change his “dead”
status even when he repeatedly met them in person.
“We went to the district offices at least 10 times, out of which five times he
[Chand] also accompanied us,” said Naresh, Chand’s grandson. “Even after
several attempts to get this anomaly corrected at the government offices, and
after filing a grievance complaint on the chief minister’s portal, nothing
happened.”
It was only after Chand carried out the parody of a marriage procession and met
a local politician that the authorities finally admitted their mistake and
released Chand’s pension.
Chand is not an isolated instance of algorithm failure. According to data
presented by the government in the state assembly in August last year, it
stopped the pensions of 277,115 elderly citizens and 52,479 widows in a span of
three years because they were “dead”.
However, several thousands of these beneficiaries were actually alive and had
been wrongfully declared dead either due to incorrect data fed into the PPP
database or wrong predictions made by the algorithm.
Via
The RISKS Digest Volume 34 Issue 5:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/34/5#subj25
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
