What happened
It was reported that the Indian state of Telangana used a data-matching platform called Samagra Vedika to cancel the food-security ration cards of large numbers of families, and that many of those cancellations were later said to be wrong. An investigation by the Reporters’ Collective, published with Al Jazeera and the Pulitzer Center, found that the platform, built by a company called Posidex Technologies, pulled together data from dozens of government databases, covering things like electricity and water connections, property and vehicle ownership, and pension records, and used machine learning and entity-resolution techniques to build profiles of residents and flag the ones it judged ineligible. Between 2014 and 2019, the investigation found, the state cancelled more than 1.8 million existing ration cards and rejected 142,086 fresh applications, often with no notice to the families involved. Thousands of those exclusions, the journalists found, came down to faulty data and bad matches: people wrongly recorded as owning a car, paying property tax, or working for the government. The burden then fell on the families cut off to prove they were eligible.
In April 2022 the matter reached the Supreme Court, in a petition brought by the activist S Q Masood. According to reports of the hearing, the Court directed the state to carry out field verification of all the ration cards cancelled under a 2016 directive and to deal promptly with any aggrieved cardholder’s representation, noting that seventeen parameters had been used before cancellation and that the state “should have been more cautious before cancelling the cards.” Verification results afterwards, as the journalists described them, showed only a small fraction of reviewed applications being approved, which they took as a sign that the share of people wrongly cut off was higher than the government’s stated error rate. The state’s IT department defended the system as more efficient than the manual checks it replaced, and later reopened applications, the journalists noted, using the same technology.
What an auditable version would have shown
A ration card is meant to guarantee a family food, so behind every cancellation there is a simple question: what data said this family was not eligible, and was it right? An auditable version would answer that before the card is cut, not after the family turns up at the shop and is turned away. Each cancellation would come with a signed note of the match that caused it, the databases and fields it used, and the exact thing the family supposedly failed on. Add those up and you can see how often the matching gets it wrong, as a real number, the figure the journalists could only guess at from the verification that came later. Families being wrongly cut off would show in that number early, instead of only coming to light when a court steps in and orders a re-check.
Where the gap was
A family’s entitlement was withdrawn on the strength of an automated match, and any checking came afterwards, often, the journalists reported, with no notice to the family at all. A VerificationGate would hold that match to be confirmed, and the family given a chance to respond, before something as serious as a food entitlement is taken away. A ConductRecord would keep the basis of each cancellation, the data it rested on and the test it failed, so a wrongly excluded family could see why and argue back from the record instead of being left to prove a negative. The failure was not that data was used, but that an automated match was treated as the last word, with no accessible record tying each cancellation to the data behind it in a form the family could challenge.
What governance should have looked like
When a system decides who keeps the right to food, speed is not the test that matters, but getting it right is. Before an automated match takes away an entitlement, a person should check it and the family should be told, and the process should keep track of how often it gets things wrong rather than trust that it is efficient. Where the data cannot be shown to support a cancellation, it is the cancellation that should wait, not the family’s next meal. That is close to what the Court itself reached for: caution before cancelling, and a record that can tell each person, plainly, why they were cut off.
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Failure Pattern: an entity-matching algorithm withdrew a statutory entitlement on the strength of imperfect data, frequently without prior notice or verification, and left affected people to prove their eligibility after being cut off.
Governance Principle: before an automated system withdraws a statutory entitlement, the match it relies on should be verified and the person notified, and each cancellation should carry a record of its basis that the person can contest.
The reference implementation of VerificationGate and ConductRecord is open source. It lives at github.com/saffronandindia/headlights-oss, Apache 2.0 licensed and free to install. The repository is public now.
Sources
- How an algorithm denied food to thousands of poor in India’s Telangana (Pulitzer Center)
- Supreme Court questions Telangana over cancelling 21 lakh ration cards (Deccan Herald, 27 April 2022)
- Telangana employs same tech to issue new ration cards that deleted 20 lakh names (The South First)