Overview
- Reports on Thursday and Friday show data firms are actively recruiting thousands of contributors in India and paying about 250 rupees (roughly $2.6) per hour for filmed household and workplace tasks.
- Companies ask participants to wear head‑mounted cameras, video glasses and motion bands and to repeat actions in home and studio settings to create varied 'egocentric' and depth data for robot training.
- Firms such as Objectways and subcontractors including Qanat say they supply large volumes of footage to multinational clients and machine‑learning platforms like Amazon SageMaker.
- Recordings are produced at high throughput — studios report more than 90 short videos a day and frequent scene changes — and workers describe constant filming, strict quality checks and heavy daily quotas.
- Policymakers and researchers warn the paid work gives near‑term income but may hide long‑term automation risks for India’s 490 million informal workers as demand for humanoid robots and training data grows.