How an algorithm denied food to thousands of poor in India’s Telangana
www.aljazeera.com
It adopted AI in welfare schemes to weed out ineligible ones, but has wrongfully removed thousands of legitimate ones.

India runs one of the world’s largest food security programmes, which promises subsidised grains to about two-thirds of its 1.4 billion population.

Historically, government officials verified and approved welfare applicants’ eligibility through field visits and physical verifications of documents. But in 2016, Telangana’s previous government, under the Bharat Rashtra Samithi party, started arming the officials with Samagra Vedika, an algorithmic system that consolidates citizens’ data from several government databases to create comprehensive digital profiles or “360-degree views”.

  • sarmale
    1·
    10 months ago

    What sort of data does the algorithm use?

    • 0x815@feddit.deOP
      3·
      10 months ago

      The article doesn’t say which classifier algorithm they use in that case in India.

      We had a similar incident in the Netherlands last year, for example, with similar problems. There they used Gradient Boosting afaik. But it doesn’t really matter as all these algorithms will yield a high number of false positives. If we use this and blindly trust trust the result in sensitive areas such as social welfare, we cause a lot if harm to iur society.