From Farm to AI: How Rural India's Night Shift Powers the Global Tech Revolution

By day, Chandmani Kerketta tends to her family's tomato and pea fields in the eastern state of Jharkhand. By night, the 27-year-old history graduate logs onto her computer, joining a growing legion of rural Indian workers performing the meticulous digital labor that fuels artificial intelligence.

Kerketta is part of a strategic, government-backed shift to bring more of India's vast population into the formal digital economy, with a particular focus on empowering women. Her work—labeling images, annotating videos, and performing quality checks—forms the essential bedrock for machine learning models used in everything from autonomous vehicles to fraud detection.

"This job helped me finish my studies and contribute at home," Kerketta says, describing a grueling yet empowering routine. "After my night shift, I sleep a little, and then help in farming. In Jharkhand, farming is everything, but now, so is this."

She is one of an estimated 200,000 data annotators now working from India's villages and small towns, according to industry estimates from firms like Scry AI—a figure that represents roughly half the world's total data-labeling workforce. These workers process hundreds of images, videos, and documents per shift, often from home or local internet hubs connected by national infrastructure like the Indian Railways' fiber-optic network.

For 25-year-old Anju Kumari, also in Jharkhand, the work is a portal to a wider world. Tasks can be painstaking, like labeling video frames to teach an AI system to distinguish between a legitimate ATM user and a potential burglar. "It's detailed work," she says, "but it connects my small town to problems being solved globally."

India's AI Ambition Goes Rural

India, set to host a major international AI summit next month, now ranks third globally in AI capability, having recently overtaken South Korea and Japan on a Stanford University index. While tech hubs like Bengaluru and Hyderabad have long hosted back-end operations for global firms, the AI push is deliberately fanning out.

In Tamil Nadu, Indu Nadarajan travels to a small-town office of NextWealth, a Bengaluru-based AI services firm, where she labels road scenes for self-driving car algorithms. "Many go to big cities to learn about AI," says Nadarajan, who holds a master's in mathematics. "But being here in our hometown and contributing to this field makes me feel very proud."

NextWealth's founder, 80-year-old Sridhar Mitta, a former Wipro technology chief, sees this dispersal as inevitable. "When I can design a product for a U.S. company 5,000 miles away, why can't I do it from 200 miles away?" he argues. "Anybody can be anywhere. The value travels through the internet." His distributed employees earn between $275 and $550 monthly—a significant sum in rural economies.

Quietly Reshaping Lives, Especially for Women

The ripple effects are profound, particularly for women from conservative backgrounds. Amala Dhanapal, a colleague of Nadarajan and the first college graduate in her family, says the work has altered perceptions. "It's a big thing," she notes. "It provided a gateway to learning and financial independence. Many girls here find it difficult to even pursue education due to family expectations."

Kerketta recalls initial skepticism from her village. "When I first started, people mocked me," she says. "Now, when they see me going around on my scooter, they look at me with pride. Just like I do myself."

While AI automation threatens some jobs, Mitta believes it will seed "micro-entrepreneurship" in small towns. "They may not build another billion-dollar company," he says, "but they will create something useful for their region."

As U.S. tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon announce billions in data center investments in India, the country's rural workforce is becoming an indispensable, if often invisible, cog in the global AI machine—tending digital fields by night so the technology can bear fruit by day.

Reader Reactions:

Priya Sharma, Tech Journalist, Mumbai: "This is a brilliant case of leveraging India's demographic dividend. It's not just about cheap labor; it's about integrating underserved communities into the knowledge economy and building rural resilience."

Arjun Mehta, Rural Development Consultant, Delhi: "The income is vital, but we must ensure these are career pathways, not dead-end gigs. Training and upskilling programs need to follow the infrastructure."

Dr. Lena Fernandez, AI Ethics Researcher, Barcelona: "This exposes the hidden human cost of 'automation.' While celebrating opportunity, we must ask: Are these workers fairly compensated for the value they create for Silicon Valley? The global AI supply chain still looks uncomfortably like colonial resource extraction."

Rohit Kumar, Small Business Owner, Patna: "My cousin does this work. It's changed her life. She bought a smartphone, helps pay her brother's fees. This is real progress, happening quietly in thousands of homes."