Why India's next AI wave won't come just from offices or big cities
- Team TOI
- TNNUpdated: Feb 23, 2026, 21:59 IST IST
When 27-year-old Chandmani Kerketta finishes tending tomatoes and peas on her family farm in Jharkhand, she doesn’t stop working. She switches on a computer and begins the kind of labour most people never see: tagging, annotating and checking data that trains artificial intelligence systems.
The work can be tedious, often boring, but someone needs to do it. There would be no driverless cars if someone didn’t do this. Every ‘smart’ system — whether it is meant to recognise road markings, detect a disease in a crop, or interpret speech — needs loads of labelled examples. Kerketta is doing precisely that, data labelling.
The work can be tedious, often boring, but someone needs to do it. There would be no driverless cars if someone didn’t do this. Every ‘smart’ system — whether it is meant to recognise road markings, detect a disease in a crop, or interpret speech — needs loads of labelled examples. Kerketta is doing precisely that, data labelling.
