Rural India powers global AI models

Workers in rural India are labelling images, videos and documents for AI models, with an estimated workforce of at least 200,000 annotators; major tech firms have announced multi-billion-dollar data centre investments in the country.

Rural workers across India are performing data labelling and annotation tasks that feed global AI models. Many combine night shifts of online work with daytime farming or household duties. The government and some local firms present the shift as a way to broaden employment, including for women from conservative backgrounds. Small-town offices and modest internet-connected centres are enabling this pattern. Key facts: - Scry AI estimates there are at least 200,000 annotators in India’s villages and small towns, described as roughly half of the world’s data-labelling workforce. - Work includes labelling images, videos and documents, sometimes frame-by-frame for tasks such as teaching systems to recognise people at ATMs or road features for autonomous vehicles. - The article profiles rural workers in Jharkhand and Tamil Nadu, including Chandmani Kerketta, Indu Nadarajan and Anju Kumari, who combine local responsibilities with paid annotation work. - US tech firms including Google, Microsoft and Amazon have announced multi-billion-dollar investments to build large data centres in India, while local firms run small-town offices to support international clients. - NextWealth founder Sridhar Mitta described distributed teams earning about $275–$550 a month and said remote work can let people produce value for distant companies. Summary: The expansion of data-labelling work into rural areas is changing day-to-day livelihoods and creating paid opportunities that many workers, including women, report as widening educational and economic options. India’s growing role in AI is occurring alongside major data-centre investments and a planned international AI summit next month, with the broader trajectory of the shift undetermined at this time.