Family ID database in Haryana records living pensioners as dead and stops their pensions
What happened
In June 2020 Haryana began using its family identity database, the Parivar Pehchan Patra, to decide who was eligible for welfare. The database recorded some living people as dead and others with incomes they did not have, and their pensions stopped. In September 2022 a 102-year-old man led a mock wedding procession through Rohtak to show officials he was alive.
Figures the government gave the state assembly in August 2023 showed that it had stopped the pensions of 277,115 elderly people and 52,479 widows over three years because they were recorded as dead. According to an investigation published by Al Jazeera, several thousand of them were alive.
- June 2020
- Haryana
- Welfare and public services
- Automated decision systemParivar Pehchan Patra, the state’s family identity database, run by the Citizen Resources Information Department. Officials have said it uses artificial intelligence and machine learning. How it reaches its decisions has not been published.
- Failed or made an error
- Economic or property, human or fundamental rights
- Elderly people and widows whose pensions were stopped
- An official statement
- Added 01.10.2026
What followed
After protests the state held grievance camps to review the data. On 29 August 2023 the Chief Minister said that of 63,353 people whose old-age pensions had been halted on the basis of the database, 44,050 were later found to be eligible, and that most of the errors had been corrected.
The government has not said whether the mistakes came from wrong data entry or from the system’s own inferences. Both sources come from the same reporting team.
Sources
- In India, an algorithm declares them dead; they have to prove they’re alive
Al Jazeera,
- Haryana’s Family ID declared thousands of people dead, halted their pension
The Reporters’ Collective,
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