How an algorithm denied food to thousands of poor in India’s Telangana

It adopted AI in welfare schemes to weed out ineligible ones, but has wrongfully removed thousands of legitimate ones.

This story was produced with support from the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network.

Hyderabad and New Delhi, India – Bismillah Bee can’t conceive of owning a car. The 67-year-old widow and 12 members of her family live in a cramped three-room house in an urban slum in Hyderabad, the capital of the Indian state of Telangana. Since her rickshaw puller husband’s death two years ago of mouth cancer, Bee makes a living by peeling garlic for a local business.

But an algorithmic system, which the Telangana government deploys to digitally profile its more than 30 million residents, tagged Bee’s husband as a car owner in 2021, when he was still alive. This deprived her of the subsidised food that the government must provide to the poor under the Indian food security law.

Thus, when the COVID-19 pandemic was raging in India and her husband’s cancer had peaked, Bee was running between government authorities to convince them that she did not own a car and that she indeed was poor.

The authorities did not trust her – they believed their algorithm. Her fight to get her rightful subsidised food supply reached the Supreme Court of India.

Bee’s family is listed as being “below-poverty-line” in India’s census records. The classification allowed her and her husband access to the state’s welfare benefits, including up to 12 kilogrammes of rice at one rupee ($0.012) per kg as against the market price of about 40 rupees ($0.48).

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