The dreams of modern India rarely make it to Rayagada. The Indians of these eastern forests forage for sago leaves and wild mango to survive. Barely a third can sign their names. Most live without electricity. Many have joined a Maoist insurgency fighting to overthrow the system.

Now, modernity is creeping in. Smart cards, fingerprint scanners and biometric identity software are transforming Rayagada into a laboratory to test a thesis with deep implications for the future of India: Can technology fix a nation? The target here is the disastrously corrupt Public Distribution System, a $15 billion food subsidy program frozen in a pre-digital world, where bound journals hold falsified records scrawled in handwriting so illegible one reformer lamented ''even God could not read it.''

For a country repeatedly jolted by screaming corruption scandals, the fraud and theft tainting the Public Distribution System is the ever-present white noise in the background, losing an estimated 58 percent of its subsidized grain, sugar and kerosene to so-called ''leakages'' - the scams that infest every part of the system.

The system is meant to serve 400 million people, yet more than 250 million Indians are undernourished and 43 percent of children under 5 are stunted.

The program's failure is a symptom of the government dysfunction that has disillusioned many who were left out of India's economic growth and driven some to join the Maoists, branded the country's top internal security threat. – Photos by AP.