Mangalsutra Meets Metadata: Inside Enterprise Marriage Data Cleaning with SAS and R
Sacred Vows, Corrupted Rows: Cleaning Indian Marriage Data Before Analytics Collapse Introduction: The Monday Morning Disaster Nobody Expected Three years ago, I walked into a regulatory war room at 7:10 AM. Nobody touched the coffee. A Fortune 500 healthcare insurer had just failed an internal audit tied to a demographic enrichment pipeline. The system merged public marriage registration data with policyholder records to predict dependent coverage eligibility, fraud probability, and regional premium risk. The dashboard showed a dramatic increase in “high-stability family households. Executives celebrated. Actuaries recalculated premium forecasts. AI models approved lower-risk policies. Then QA found the bomb. Duplicate spouse IDs. Thousands of them. One corrupted merge key inflated married-household counts by 18%. Worse, negative claim reimbursements silently passed through because the billing field was stored as character data. Values like " -45000 ...