As soon as Meda Ramana was elected the head of Garapadu village council in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, several residents complained to her of being wrongfully excluded from government welfare schemes.
About 50 villagers – mostly women of the Dalit, Indigenous and religious-minority communities – told her in early 2021 that their annual welfare benefits, of 10,000 rupees ($119) to 120,000 rupees ($1,430), under various schemes, had been abruptly stopped by the state government.
At first glance, it seemed to be an innocuous data entry error. But when Ramana enquired about the reasons, staff at the village secretariat told her the villagers were ineligible for the welfare because they had “migrated”. Ramana told the secretariat that the complainants were very much living there, but to no avail.
She then complained to higher officials in the district administration who ordered the village staff to conduct a probe. But the village staff ignored those directives. It was at this point that Ramana began to smell a political ploy.
Andhra Pradesh is one of the two states that held regional elections in May 2024, during the time of India’s national poll that re-elected the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Andhra Pradesh state election was fought between two dominant regional parties – the incumbent YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP).
The TDP won, but in the run-up to the elections, the outgoing YSRCP government ran a sophisticated, data-driven voter influence campaign that wrongfully denied poor and vulnerable communities their welfare benefits because members of those communities were likely to vote for the opposition, our investigation reveals.
Multiple media reports have highlighted how governing parties in India – the BJP at the national level and others in the states – have accessed and misused government-collected personal data of citizens in past elections. The TDP did the same when it was in power in Andhra Pradesh during the previous election in 2019.
Our investigation reveals, for the first time, the real-world harm caused by such misuse – with the vulnerable being denied their rightful welfare benefits and their rights to exercise free choice in elections undermined.
Welfare delivery was a major election plank in Andhra Pradesh. The then-incumbent YSRCP government said it transferred about 4.3 trillion rupees ($50.7bn) in its five-year term to about 127.4 million poor and marginalised people, including through pensions and housing and food support.
It appointed paid “volunteers” to “proactively” deliver welfare at citizens’ doorsteps, replacing the traditional method in which elected village councils, known as panchayats, administered the welfare.
One volunteer was appointed for every 50 households – approximately 260,000 volunteers covered more than 1.3 million households in the state. Every volunteer was paid 5,000 rupees ($60) per month from the state exchequer.
The YSRCP government also gave this army of volunteers unfettered powers and technological tools to indiscriminately harvest the personal data of citizens. It used the data to create voter “profiles” and predict their political choices.
The information was then used by the government volunteers and YSRCP cadres to influence these voters including through dubious tactics like excluding opposition-inclined voters from welfare schemes.
When Ramana and her husband looked through the list of Garapadu’s excluded families in 2021, they saw a pattern. “All the wrongly-excluded families were supporters of TDP”, the opposition party at the time, claimed Sagar, Ramana’s husband who is also an active TDP worker.
The couple concluded that the “village volunteers”, were singling out TDP supporters and cutting off their benefits “to pressurise them to switch their support to YSRCP”.
In April 2022, 27 women from Garapadu filed a case in the state’s high court against the village volunteers and government officials for “illegally” cutting off their benefits for “political reasons”. The court found the women were “eligible” for the schemes and reprimanded the state for the village volunteers’ “illegal actions”.
The women’s benefits were resumed after the court’s order and residents of several other villages from the state filed more than 100 similar complaints in court the same year, said G Arun Showri, a lawyer who represented the Garapadu petitioners in the high court.
“All claimed the village volunteers blocked welfare benefits of eligible claimants who were supporters of the opposition party,” Showri said.
But how did the volunteers know the political preferences of villagers? A review of the volunteer scheme’s documents – service contracts, source code of the software application they used, official WhatsApp groups – and more than a dozen interviews with political workers, campaign managers and voters, revealed the method.
The volunteers were required to conduct a “baseline survey” of the assigned households using a mobile application. An analysis of the source code of the app, first carried out by internet-governance researcher Srinivas Kodali, shows data to be collected for every resident – including their home address, employment and family information such as data on caste, religion, education and health status (with granular details such as diseases and pregnancies).
These were meticulously recorded and constantly monitored. The source code analysis was reviewed and verified by this correspondent.
The volunteers conducted periodic surveys, including over WhatsApp, to keep the profiles updated. Each volunteer was allocated a WhatsApp group of 50 households. The volunteers recorded data on the “felt needs” of the citizens and their “feedback” about the governance.
“Volunteers will identify the problems being faced by citizens in their jurisdiction, and the same will be brought to the notice of government officials to get them resolved,” said the government order for recruiting volunteers.
Sagar, Ramana’s husband, said: “Because of this persistent monitoring of households over five years in the name of government surveys, the volunteers have become aware of the complete profile of the households, including their likes and dislikes, mental stresses and financial problems. They can then easily assess which household is a supporter of the YSRCP government, the opponents and neutral voters.”