An algorithm rolled out by the government in Haryana, India, to verify welfare claimants has been “killing” them.
Now, those erroneously declared dead by the system are going to extraordinary lengths to prove that they are still alive.
News network Al Jazeera recounted the story of 102-year-old Dhuli Chand, who had to organise a mock wedding procession just to prove to officials in his Haryana town that he was, in fact, not dead.
During the procession, he sat on a chariot holding a placard declaring, in the local dialect: “Thara foofa zinda hai” (your uncle is still alive).
He had to organise the elaborate display after he stopped receiving his monthly pension of about Rs2,750 ($44) six months earlier because he was declared “dead” in government records.
The bureaucratic snafu happened after Haryana began using 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.
But PPP wrongly marked Mr Chand as dead, and officials refused to rectify the error even after he met them repeatedly.
“We went to the district offices at least 10 times, out of which five times he (Chand) also accompanied us,” Mr Chand’s grandson Naresh told Al Jazeera.
“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,” he said.
It took a wedding procession before the state’s officials finally conceded to release Mr Chand’s pension.
Al Jazeera said Mr Chand’s case is not an isolated one.
Some 277,115 elderly citizens and 52,479 widows were declared dead and lost their pensions since the PPP was rolled out in Haryana in 2020, according to data obtained by Al Jazeera.
But several thousands were actually still alive, and they had to navigate a maze of red tape before they could have their information corrected.
Many were shunted from one office to another, and made to file endless applications to prove that they were in fact alive.
State officials insist the programme remains an effective tool in processing welfare claims.
“PPP was easing and improving the delivery of services to the right beneficiaries, and preventing leakages through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said Ms Sofia Dahiya, secretary of the Citizen Resources Information Department, which handles the functioning of PPP.
“The interlinking of different databases was done to get an integrated database which was the ‘single source of truth’.”
After Mr Chand’s “wedding procession” hit the headlines, thousands thronged the district offices of Haryana’s social welfare department.
In response, the government opened grievance redressal camps across Haryana to review PPP data.
Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar has revealed that out of the total 63,353 beneficiaries whose old-age pensions were halted based on PPP data, 44,050 were later found to be eligible.
Mr Khattar said the government has since corrected most of the erroneous records.
But media reports suggest that errors still persist.
Indo-Asian News Service
