How An Algorithm Declared Several Elderly Citizens As "Dead" In Haryana: Report (Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash)
In September 2022, a 102-year-old man staged a protest in Haryana’s Rohtak. Dhuli Chand staged this protest to prove that he is “alive.” Dhuli Chand, a farmer, claims that his pension was stopped a few months ago because he was declared “dead” in government records. According to an Al Jazeera report, an algorithm rolled out by the state government to verify welfare candidates has been wrongfully declaring the candidates dead.
Duli Chand took out a procession on the streets of Rohtak to send a message to government officials that he is alive. As per the Al Jazeera report, people aged 60 years and above in Haryana, whose annual income does not exceed 300,000 rupees, are eligible for a monthly pension of 2,750 rupees under the state”s Old Age Samman Allowance scheme. The Haryana government started using a newly built algorithmic system, named the Parivar Pehchan Patra (PPP) database, in June 2020 to find the eligibility of welfare applicants.
As per the report, PPP is an eight-digit unique ID provided to each family in Haryana. It contains all the details, including the birth and death, marriage, employment, property, and other details of the family members. PPP was mandatory for all citizens in the state to avail various welfare schemes. Parivar Pehchan Patra is an ambitious program of the state government. The government says that the primary objective of PPP is to create “authentic, verified and reliable data of all families in the state.”
According to the Al Jazeera report, the database marked Dhuli Chand as “dead,” and his pension was denied due to this reason for several months. It is worth mentioning that Dhuli Chand”s “dead” status was not changed even after meeting the concerned authorities in person. Naresh, Chand’s grandson, told Al Jazeera that they went to the district offices several times. He also said that “nothing happened” even after filing a complaint on the chief minister’s portal. However, after carrying out the procession, the authorities admitted their mistake. They have also released Dhuli Chand”s pension.
The report says that 102-year-old Dhuli Chand was not an isolated instance of algorithm failure. Al Jazeera, citing the official data, reported that the Haryana government has halted the pensions of 277,115 elderly citizens and 52,479 widows in a span of three years as they were declared “dead.” But several people on this list were actually alive and had been declared dead wrongfully. This serious situation emerged either due to wrong predictions made by the algorithm or incorrect data fed into the PPP database. Several citizens were excluded from the eligibility criteria of various welfare schemes as the database algorithm made wrong predictions about their employment or income. Citizens also reportedly filed several applications to prove that they were alive.
Congress, the opposition in Haryana, has severely criticised the state government by highlighting the flaws in the PPP portal. Congress also announced that the party would remove the PPP scheme if it came to power in 2024. The state governments in the country have mainly depended on technology to end welfare fraud.
Al Jazeera mentioned in its report that they have met several families in Haryana who have been denied their pensions due to errors in the PPP database. The state government earlier argued that the new initiative allowed proper delivery of welfare schemes. In August 2023, Haryana CM Manohar Lal Khattar stated that out of the total 63,353 beneficiaries whose old-age pensions were stopped based on PPP data, 44,050 were later found to be eligible.
