Biometrics and Access to Food by Poor in India

[cdev]

I keep hearing these stories about poor people in India who first had all their money declared worthless if they could not convert it in time, and now this "Aadhaar" biometrics scheme. People now are starving to death both because Aadhaar did not work, and because of outright theft of other people's resources.

This is from a report by an NGO called "Right to Food Campaign" about a chain of deaths of the poorest people - such as 67 year old widow Etwariya Devi who starved to death recently because the system was broken.

“Dealers have started tampering with digital records in order to hide accumulated stocks. One way they do this is to separate authentication and distribution – get people’s fingerprints and/or tell them that they would get rations later, and then play hide-and-seek. As per the online records, ration was allotted to the dealer for October-December. But the dealer did not distribute ration to many cardholders claiming that he did not have adequate ration stock. These irregularities show that the introduction of Aadhaar-based biometric authentication has failed to curb leakages in the PDS. In fact, it has created new barriers to the access of rations,”

This is an example of how technology should NEVER be used.