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How an algorithm denied food to thousands of poor in India (www.aljazeera.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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”.

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[–] sarmale 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What sort of data does the algorithm use?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 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.