Lower thirds:

00:02 Report by / Adil Bhat and Sharique Ahmad
00:21 Ravi Kumar / Factory worker
00:54 Ravi Kumar / Factory worker
01:35 Rahul Jaswani / Factory owner
02:17 Puneet Jindal / Founder of company 'Labellerr AI'
03:06 Puneet Jindal / Founder of company 'Labellerr AI'
03:39 Avinash Kumar / Professor of Labour studies, JNU University New Delhi

Script:

For factory worker Ravi Kumar, wearing a camera has become just another part of the job. 

As he works, it records every movement he makes - from picking up tools to producing auto parts. 

But the camera isn’t just recording his work. It’s helping train artificial intelligence systems. 

+++ Ravi Kumar, Factory worker (Hindi) +++
"They’re recording our work to prepare and train a robot, which is making us a bit worried as it will affect our work. It will not only impact the work we do here, but it will mean job losses." 

Ravi’s concern is shared by many workers here.  

The factory pays its workers about one euro an hour to record their work, on top of their regular wages. 

But that small bonus comes at a cost: workers say the cameras have brought a new kind of anxiety to the factory floor.  

Ravi Kumar, Factory worker  

+++ Ravi Kumar, Factory worker (Hindi) +++
"When the camera is on your head you fear making mistakes. We always feel that if the employer watches the recording our mistakes may get caught. The camera has taken away some of the freedom we had to work without fear or pressure."

The man behind this project is factory owner Rahul Jaswani, who oversees the recordings as part of a growing business.  

For Jaswani, the workers fearful of losing their jobs are not his immediate concern.  

He sells these first-person recordings to companies building humanoid robots. For him, it’s simple: workers training AI is a win for the factory.  

+++ Rahul Jaswani, Factory Owner (Hindi) +++
"I’m excited about AI technology. It will increase production in my factory and bring more efficiency. There will be fewer mistakes in what we produce. Also, it will be very profitable for us, and it is very good for business in the long term. That is why I’m very excited that these humanoid robots will be coming to India, and they should be deployed in our factories."

One company turning footage into a business is Labellerr AI. It’s this firm that extracts and processes the data from the factory where Ravi works.  

The company turns hours of video into training data by identifying and tagging every single action. It then sells that data to AI companies, mostly in the United States. 

+++ Puneet Jindal, Founder of Labellerr, AI Company +++
“Now AI is moving from digital world where GPT or chat GPTs to a physical AI. What I mean by that is like robots are going to be a reality. They're going to work in the factories, do our work, automate a lot of menial work for us. And to build those algorithms, the one way to train these robots is to collect humans doing this task by putting wearables on them.” 

And the demand for this kind of data is booming. 

Morgan Stanley estimates the humanoid robot market could be worth five trillion dollars by 2050 with nearly a billion robots in use worldwide. In that race, India has become one of the most sought-after places to train them. 

+++ Puneet Jindal, Founder of Labellerr, AI Company +++
"We have huge demand. The demand is like simply to quantify it - it is 1 billion hours, for example, over just next two years. It needs to be collected to just make the robots able to at least start working in very basic tasks in factories or warehouses."

That scale of collection is exactly what concerns Avinash Kumar, a labour economist.  

He says the emerging AI economy raises big questions about ownership, profit and fair compensation - questions that remain unanswered. 

+++ Avinash Kumar, Professor of Labour studies, JNU University New Delhi +++
"You see, the workers are facing a double whammy. One is that they are being exploited. They are being taken away the value that they are generating by converting their human skill into a data set and second that their factory owners are watching and monitoring every moment of action they are doing, so it is a kind of controlled regime or surveillance regime that is coming."  

For Avinash Kumar, the law has yet to catch up. He says there is no specific legal framework on how workplace recordings can be used to train AI. 

Back at the factory, Ravi Kumar and his colleagues continue with their daily routine - every movement still teaching the machine to do their job.  

Whether this technology will create new opportunities or replace these workers remains unclear.  

What troubles them most, they say, is that right now India has no protections in place for workers training AI. 

END