Welfare algorithm in Telangana wrongly tags poor families as ineligible for subsidised food
What happened
From 2016 Telangana used a system called Samagra Vedika to check who was eligible for welfare. It pulls together a person’s records from several government databases and flags signs of ineligibility, such as owning a car. An investigation published by Al Jazeera in January 2024 found that it had matched people to assets they did not own. In one case a widow lost her food security card because the system confused her late husband, a rickshaw puller, with a car owner of a similar name.
Between 2014 and 2019 the state cancelled more than 1.86 million food security cards and rejected 142,086 new applications without notice. Not all of these can be put down to the system. But when the Supreme Court ordered the cancelled cards to be checked again in the field, 15,471 of the first 205,734 applications examined were approved, which suggests that at least 7.5 percent had been wrongly rejected.
- 2016
- Telangana
- Welfare and public services
- Automated decision systemSamagra Vedika, built by Posidex Technologies and run by the state government. It links a person’s records across government databases, using what the state calls machine learning and entity resolution.
- Failed or made an error
- Economic or property, human or fundamental rights
- Families whose food security cards were cancelled or refused
- Independent reporting
- Added 01.10.2026
What followed
In April 2022 the Supreme Court directed Telangana to carry out field verification of all the cancelled cards and to deal with representations from anyone affected. The state’s IT department refused requests under the Right to Information Act for the system’s source code and data formats, saying the company held rights over them.
The Telangana government disputes the findings. Its IT department told Al Jazeera that checks by several departments had found very high levels of accuracy.
Sources
- How an algorithm denied food to thousands of poor in India’s Telangana
Al Jazeera,
- ‘You Cannot Cancel Before Verification’: Supreme Court On Telangana Govt Cancelling 19 Lakh Ration Cards; Directs Field Verification
LiveLaw,
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