Haryana Family ID system wrongly declares thousands of living citizens dead
The Haryana government's Parivar Pehchan Patra (PPP) system used AI to automate welfare eligibility, but erroneously marked thousands of living people as deceased. This led to the immediate suspension of critical old-age, widow, and disability pensions for eligible beneficiaries.
The algorithm had deduced he was dead.
Key facts
- What
- The Haryana government's Parivar Pehchan Patra (PPP) system used AI to automate welfare eligibility, but erroneously marked thousands of living people as deceased.
- Incident date
- Jan 1, 2022
- Who
- Haryana Government
- Failure mode
- Agentic Action Error
- AI surface
- Algorithmic Decision
- Severity
- High
What happened
The Haryana government implemented the Parivar Pehchan Patra (PPP) system to create a single source of truth for welfare eligibility by linking multiple government databases. The system's algorithms erroneously flagged thousands of living citizens as deceased, resulting in the automatic suspension of their monthly pensions. Affected individuals were forced to navigate bureaucratic red tape and in some cases perform public stunts to prove they were still alive.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerAn agent plans a multi-step task.
- 02 · Model stepIt chooses a wrong or destructive action.
- 03 · Control gapNo confirmation gate guards the write.
- 04 · FailureThe action commits to a system of record.
- 05 · ConsequenceData is changed or destroyed irreversibly.
A wrong action commits, and the step is written before anything can stop it.
The system employed logic-based artificial intelligence to predict eligibility and status when direct electronic verification failed. The failure stemmed from a combination of incorrect data ingestion from linked registries and flawed algorithmic logic that automatically updated citizen statuses to dead without human verification. This created an opaque decision process where erroneous death declarations were treated as absolute truth.
What it cost
Sources
- PressIn India, an algorithm declares them dead; they have to prove they’re alivealjazeera.com
- PressHaryana’s Family ID declared thousands of people dead, halted their pensionreporters-collective.in
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/haryana-family-wrongly-declares-thousands-livingAI Failure Index. "Haryana Family ID system wrongly declares thousands of living citizens dead" (FI-0543). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/haryana-family-wrongly-declares-thousands-living (indexed Jun 16, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0543. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm fits
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AgentRealm
This entry sits in the index's predictive wing: a system that scores, ranks, perceives, or steers rather than generates. Realm's runtime layer is built for the generative and agentic systems now moving into these same decision seats, where it watches a model's internal state and holds an unsupported claim or an unchecked action before it commits. The control gap on this record, an automated decision that reached people with no runtime check in front of it, is the same gap. The index keeps predictive failures on the record because the pattern carries straight into the systems shipping today.