The Context, a production of the Thompson Reuters Foundation, reports that India’s many unemployed young technology graduates are being lured into scams and ghost remote work jobs. “With few jobs, India’s youth are turning to the gig economy, scam call centres and AI microwork for low wages and few protections”.

The article tells the story of a young tech college graduate, who was unable to find a job related to his degree and ended up working at a call center to scam vulnerable US citizen. He told the Context:

I didn’t realise at first. It was only much later that I realised that the job was to cheat people after speaking to other colleagues who worked there. But I was already too involved in it, and I was certain that I would not get another job where I could earn 20,000-25,000 rupees ($241-$302) a month, so I continued working there.

The call center was to be place where millions of people in India, the United States, Britain and elsewhere, were being defrauded every day. Employees posed as tax officials, as workers at banks and insurers, and tech support. This was apparently a “part of the dark underbelly of India’s $220–billion information technology services industry that boomed as global firms outsourced customer support to cheaper workers with college degrees who spoke English”.

According to the Context article:

• “India is poised to become the world’s most populous country in April, overtaking China with more than 1.43 billion people, according to estimates by the United Nations.
• “It also has among the youngest populations, with more than 40% under 25 years. Yet the pace of economic growth is not enough to accommodate some 12 million people joining the workforce each year.
• “So educated youth – once touted as a demographic dividend – are forced to turn to the gig economy delivering food and groceries, to scam call centres, online microwork, and other low-paid jobs

Quoting Niti Aayog from a government think-tank, the Context writes:

• India is one of the largest and fastest-growing markets for the so-called gig economy, with nearly 8 million workers in 2020-21, and forecast to expand to 24 million workers by 2029-30.
• But what we are really seeing is an erosion of hard-won labour rights. With increased digitisation, gig work is only going to get bigger and worse – especially with data annotation and labelling for AI.
• AI relies on data annotation, which is the action of tagging content such as text, photos, audio and video so that machine learning models can recognise them.
• Up to 1 million Indians could be working full-time or part-time in data annotation and labelling by 2030

According to Muzammil Hussain, founder of Tika Data in Bengaluru: “Data annotation is the current outsourcing model. But clients don’t pay much because it is a low-skill job that has labelled more than 20 million images and 1 million words. The money for this work is always going to be low because it is easy work, even if it’s labour intensive.”