{"id":63749,"date":"2026-02-16T10:56:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T05:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prevalentindia.in\/index.php\/2026\/02\/16\/bhaat-de-bhaat-de-when-algorithms-starve-children-to-death\/"},"modified":"2026-02-16T10:56:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T05:26:08","slug":"bhaat-de-bhaat-de-when-algorithms-starve-children-to-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prevalentindia.in\/index.php\/2026\/02\/16\/bhaat-de-bhaat-de-when-algorithms-starve-children-to-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Bhaat De, Bhaat De \u2013 When Algorithms Starve Children to Death"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

SIMDEGA (Jharkhand) [India], February 16: <\/span><\/strong>Shekhar Natarajan<\/a>, Founder and CEO of Orchestro.AI, explains the impact of global influence that could change narratives in this opinion piece.<\/em><\/p>\n

The last words Santoshi Kumari ever spoke were a plea for rice.<\/p>\n

\u201cBhaat de, bhaat de,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0the eleven-year-old Dalit girl begged her mother Koyli Devi on the night of September 28, 2017, as consciousness slipped away from her emaciated body. Give me rice. Give me rice.<\/p>\n

There was no rice to give. There had been no rice for eight days. The family\u2019s ration card \u2014 their lifeline to subsidized food under the National Food Security Act \u2014 had been cancelled two months earlier because it wasn\u2019t linked to Aadhaar.<\/p>\n

At 10:30 pm, Santoshi died.<\/p>\n

She was not killed by a person. She was not killed by a disease, though the Jharkhand government would later claim malaria. She was killed by a sequence of algorithmic decisions \u2014 a digital system that marked her family as \u201cnull and void\u201d because their biometric data hadn\u2019t been properly \u201cseeded\u201d into the right database.<\/p>\n

In the language of the system, Santoshi Kumari was a \u201cdeletion.\u201d An \u201cexclusion error.\u201d A statistical anomaly that the technology\u2019s proponents would later dismiss as an acceptable failure rate.<\/p>\n

But Santoshi was a child who liked to graze cattle for the village landlords to earn a few rupees. She was a student who had completed Class 5 before her mother pulled her from school because the family needed whatever income she could bring. She was a daughter who, even in her final hours, thought of food \u2014 not for herself, but because she knew her mother had none to give.<\/p>\n

The Architecture of Exclusion<\/strong><\/h2>\n

To understand how a child can starve to death in a country that produces enough food to feed its population twice over, you must understand the architecture of India\u2019s welfare state \u2014 and how that architecture has been systematically restructured around algorithmic efficiency.<\/p>\n

The Public Distribution System, India\u2019s food security backbone, was designed with human beings in mind. Ration cards entitled families to subsidized grains \u2014 35 kilograms of rice at Rs 1 per kilo for the poorest families. The system was imperfect, plagued by corruption and leakage, but it kept millions alive.<\/p>\n

Then came Aadhaar \u2014 the world\u2019s largest biometric database, a 12-digit number tied to fingerprints and iris scans. The government promised it would eliminate fraud, root out \u201cghost beneficiaries,\u201d and ensure that benefits reached only the deserving.<\/p>\n

On March 27, 2017, Chief Secretary Raj Bala Verma issued a press release that would seal Santoshi\u2019s fate: \u201cAll ration cards which have not been linked with Aadhaar number will cease to exist from 5th April.\u201d<\/p>\n

The order violated multiple Supreme Court directives stating that Aadhaar could not be made mandatory for welfare benefits. But compliance with court orders is slow; algorithmic deletion is instantaneous.<\/p>\n

In Jharkhand alone, 11.5 lakh ration cards were cancelled after the April 5 deadline. The government celebrated these as \u201cbogus cards\u201d eliminated, claiming massive savings from the removal of \u201cghost beneficiaries.\u201d But as Santoshi\u2019s death would later reveal, many of those \u201cghosts\u201d were living, breathing human beings \u2014 often the poorest and most vulnerable, the least equipped to navigate digital bureaucracy.<\/p>\n

A Family Already on the Edge<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Life had been hard enough for Koyli Devi before her husband descended into mental illness five years earlier. The family owned a tiny rump of stony land in Karimati village that yielded nothing. Before his illness, her husband would find five days of work each month, earning perhaps Rs 100 a day for hard labor in the fields. Koyli Devi would bring in even less, cleaning cowsheds or collecting and selling leaves from the forest.<\/p>\n

With her husband now unable to work \u2014 sleeping or wandering, lost in his own mind \u2014 the burden fell entirely on Koyli Devi\u2019s thin shoulders. She had to feed and tend to him, his aged mother, and their four children. She had married off two daughters when they were around twelve; one had returned home. A young boy she held to her breast. And Santoshi, her youngest daughter, pulled from school to graze the landlords\u2019 cattle.<\/p>\n

Their income: Rs 80 to Rs 90 per week.<\/p>\n

Their lifeline: the Public Distribution System, which entitled them to 35 kilos of rice at Rs 1 per kilo. Without it, they would have to buy rice at market rates \u2014 Rs 720 to Rs 1,400 per month. An impossibility.<\/p>\n

When their ration card was cancelled on July 22, 2017, the family\u2019s fragile equilibrium shattered. Koyli Devi had tried to comply with the Aadhaar mandate. She had visited the block office repeatedly. On September 1, 2017 \u2014 less than a month before her daughter\u2019s death \u2014 activists had submitted a written complaint to the district supply officer with a photocopy of her Aadhaar card, requesting a new ration card.<\/p>\n

The online portal, officials later explained, wasn\u2019t working.<\/p>\n

The new ration card arrived two weeks after Santoshi died.<\/p>\n

The Days Before Death<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The fact-finding team from the Right to Food Campaign would later document what happened in those final days. Unable to find work \u2014 contractors had illegally used machines instead of manual labor under MGNREGA, and wage registers were fudged \u2014 Koyli Devi and Santoshi began begging for food outside the homes of their richer upper-caste neighbors.<\/p>\n

Sometimes they received something. Often they did not.<\/p>\n

For eight days, the family went without adequate food. The entire family was, as the investigators would later describe them, \u201cstick thin.\u201d Koyli Devi herself, though breastfeeding her infant son, could barely stand.<\/p>\n

Koyli Devi\u2019s mother-in-law hadn\u2019t received her pension for months \u2014 it too had been entangled in Aadhaar problems. The only reliable food had been the mid-day meal Santoshi received at school, even after dropping out.<\/p>\n

But in late September, the school closed for Durga Puja holidays.<\/p>\n

On September 28, Santoshi began losing consciousness. The starving child asked her mother for rice. Koyli Devi went to the ration dealer one last time.<\/p>\n

\u201cI went to get rice,\u201d she told investigators, \u201cbut I was told that no ration will be given to me. My daughter died saying \u2018bhaat, bhaat.’\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The family took Santoshi to a local doctor, who advised feeding the girl \u2014 her body was failing from hunger. But there was no food at home.<\/p>\n

The custom in their caste is to bury rather than cremate the dead. Koyli Devi tearfully laid her child in a shallow grave.<\/p>\n

The Aftermath: Blame the Victim<\/strong><\/h2>\n

What happened next reveals how systems protect themselves from accountability.<\/p>\n

Local officials immediately claimed Santoshi had died of malaria, not starvation. They approached Koyli Devi with offers: if she would change her story, she would be \u201cadequately rewarded.\u201d When rewards didn\u2019t work, they threatened to exhume her daughter\u2019s body for a post-mortem \u2014 to cut up the child\u2019s remains.<\/p>\n

Koyli Devi\u2019s response showed remarkable dignity:\u00a0\u201cNow that my daughter is dead, how does it matter what anyone does with her body?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Chief Minister Raghubar Das accused Koyli Devi of bringing a \u201cbad name\u201d to her village. The upper-caste residents of Karimati took his cue, attacking the family and forcing them from their home. Their belongings were thrown out. Koyli Devi, her grandmother, and her surviving children fled eight kilometers to the neighboring village of Patiamba, seeking shelter with a local activist.<\/p>\n

The ration dealer who had refused them food was among those making threats.<\/p>\n

The Pattern Emerges<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Santoshi Kumari was not an isolated case. The Right to Food Campaign would document 57 starvation deaths between 2015 and 2018, of which at least 19 were directly linked to Aadhaar problems.<\/p>\n

Ruplal Marandi<\/strong>, 60, an Adivasi man in Jharkhand\u2019s Deoghar district: His family had been denied rations for two months because biometric authentication kept failing. The system couldn\u2019t read his fingerprints \u2014 worn smooth from decades of manual labor. He died on October 23, 2017, less than a month after Santoshi.<\/p>\n

Premani Kunwar<\/strong>, 64, a widow in Garhwa district: Her pension had been mysteriously redirected to someone else\u2019s account \u2014 a woman named Shanti Devi, who had died over two decades earlier. A ghost in the system had stolen from the living. Premani died of starvation on December 25, 2017.<\/p>\n

Etwariya Devi<\/strong>, 67, also in Jharkhand: Her pension payments had stopped for months due to Aadhaar authentication failures. She died in September 2017.<\/p>\n

The pattern was unmistakable: Dalits, Adivasis, the elderly, the disabled, the rural poor \u2014 those least equipped to navigate digital bureaucracy were being systematically excluded by systems designed to eliminate \u201cghosts.\u201d The algorithm could not distinguish between fraud and poverty, between gaming the system and being destroyed by it.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court\u2019s Verdict<\/strong><\/h2>\n

When the Supreme Court finally ruled on Aadhaar\u2019s constitutionality in September 2018, Justice Sikri\u2019s majority opinion included a passage that should haunt every architect of algorithmic welfare:<\/p>\n

\u201cNo failure rate in provision of social welfare benefits can be regarded as acceptable. To deny food is to lead a family to destitution, malnutrition and even death.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Justice Chandrachud, in his landmark dissent, went further:\u00a0\u201cThe dignity and rights of individuals cannot be based on algorithms or probabilities. Constitutional guarantees cannot be subject to the vicissitudes of technology.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

But by then, Santoshi Kumari had been dead for a year. And the systems that killed her continued to operate.<\/p>\n

What Angelic Intelligence Would Have Done<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Shekhar Natarajan, the Secunderabad-born AI pioneer who spent 25 years revolutionizing supply chains for Fortune 500 companies, describes the Aadhaar welfare system as \u201ca textbook example of what happens when efficiency becomes the only virtue.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe system was optimized for one thing: eliminating fraud,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0he explains.\u00a0\u201cNobody asked: what happens to the humans caught in the crossfire? Nobody built in a mechanism for compassion. The algorithm saw a missing link and executed a deletion. It could not see a hungry child.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Natarajan\u2019s Angelic Intelligence framework would have approached the problem differently. Instead of a single system optimizing for a single metric, multiple specialized agents \u2014 each embodying a different virtue \u2014 would collaborate on every decision.<\/p>\n

\u201cImagine,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0he says,\u00a0\u201cif the system that cancelled Koyli Devi\u2019s ration card had included an agent embodying karuna \u2014 compassion. That agent would have asked: What are the consequences of this deletion for this specific family? Are there children involved? Is this an emergency situation?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Another agent, embodying\u00a0nyaya<\/strong>\u00a0(justice), would ask: Has this family had adequate opportunity to comply? Are we treating them fairly given their circumstances? A woman who must walk kilometers to a block office while caring for a mentally ill husband and nursing an infant \u2014 has she been given reasonable accommodation?<\/p>\n

An agent embodying\u00a0raksha<\/strong>\u00a0(protection) would ask: What safeguards exist to prevent irreversible harm? Should we delay action until we can verify there\u2019s no emergency? Is there a child\u2019s life at stake?<\/p>\n

And an agent embodying\u00a0sahana<\/strong>\u00a0(patience) would simply ask: What\u2019s the rush? Can we not wait, verify, confirm before we act?<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the Aadhaar system,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Natarajan says,\u00a0\u201cefficiency was the only voice at the table. In Angelic Intelligence, efficiency is one voice among twenty-seven. And when those voices disagree \u2014 when efficiency says \u2018delete the card\u2019 but compassion says \u2018wait, there\u2019s a child\u2019 \u2014 the system is designed to pause and escalate, not to barrel forward.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

It would not have saved every life. No system can. But it might have saved Santoshi Kumari\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Bhaat de, bhaat de.<\/em><\/p>\n

The algorithm had no answer for that.<\/p>\n

If you object to the content of this press release, please notify us at pr.error.rectification@gmail.com. We will respond and rectify the situation within 24 hours.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SIMDEGA (Jharkhand) [India], February 16: Shekhar Natarajan, Founder and CEO of Orchestro.AI, explains the impact of global influence<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":63750,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[576],"class_list":["post-63749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle","tag-lifestyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prevalentindia.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prevalentindia.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prevalentindia.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prevalentindia.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prevalentindia.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/prevalentindia.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prevalentindia.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prevalentindia.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prevalentindia.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prevalentindia.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}