Get the latest tech news
How an algorithm denied food to thousands of poor in India’s Telangana | Poverty and Development
It adopted AI in welfare schemes to weed out ineligible ones, but has wrongfully removed thousands of legitimate ones.
Bismillah Bee with the old ‘Below Poverty Line’ card of the family issued in 2006 [Courtesy of The Reporters’ Collective]India spends roughly 13 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) or close to $256bn on providing welfare benefits including subsidised food, fertilisers, cooking gas, crop insurance, housing, and pensions among others. Maher Bee, pictured, was also denied access to subsidised food grains because an algorithm tagged her family as owning a car even though they didn’t have one [Courtesy of The Reporters’ Collective]Telangana projects Samagra Vedika as the pioneering technology in automating welfare decisions. David Nolan, a senior investigative researcher at the Algorithmic Accountability Lab at Amnesty International, says the rationale for deploying systems like Samagra Vedika in welfare delivery is predicated on there being a sufficient volume of fraudulent applicants, which, in practice, is likely to increase the number of incorrect matches.
Or read this on r/technology
