Indian Workers Strap on Cameras to Train Robots for $5 a Day

Rashdan Technologies pays Indian workers $5 to $10 (£3.74 to £7.47) for eight to 10 hours of recorded work, and sells that footage to robotics companies and AI labs. The buyers use it to train so-called physical AI — systems that control robots in the real world. Hundreds of thousands of workers worldwide now earn money this way, and India has become a major supplier.

Who films what?

Mohammed Ashim, 22, has cut hair and trimmed beards in Bengaluru for four years. He now straps a camera to his head for five or six hours a day. The camera records only his hands; clients' faces are blurred out.

"The routine is simple, but you have to be disciplined about how you move. The operations team taught me that my hands always have to stay cleanly inside the frame, the lighting has to be sharp, and I can't tilt my head too abruptly while working," Ashim says.

He frames the pay as secondary. "It's good money, but honestly, the feeling of doing something this futuristic is what keeps me excited. I never imagined my razor techniques would be useful to a global tech company," he says.

Local companies like Rashdan Technologies recruit hundreds of such workers each. Co-founder and CEO Shahil Baig says demand shapes the task list: "Every robotics company, every frontier AI lab, has a specific kind of data they want: industrial tasks, agriculture, household chores, small business work like pottery, garment-making, embroidery, candle-making. We go wherever the task is."

What does consent look like?

Baig says his company records hands, not faces. "We record hands, not faces, and where multi-camera rigs do capture more of the body or environment, we blur faces out. No names, no contact details, nothing that identifies them personally goes into what we hand off," he says.

Client demands are rising. Buyers now ask for four to six cameras rigged around a worker's head to capture the full scene, not just the hands. That changes the recruitment conversation. "Getting someone to agree to one small camera is one conversation. Getting them to agree to wearing what's effectively a five-camera headset is a completely different, and harder, one," Baig says. His company pays more for that tier of data collection. The market is also getting crowded: observers expect dozens more competitors to emerge in India this year.

Why can't AI learn from existing video?

Manish Agarwal, founder of Humyn Labs, which operates from Bangalore and San Francisco, argues robots cannot be trained only inside computer simulations. Physical tasks need detailed signals — limb movements, fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders and force. "For example: applying the correct grip force so a plastic bottle doesn't crumble versus a steel glass," he says.

That data did not exist before. "There is no existing internet archive of embodied human activity - no dataset of a kitchen being cleaned, or a car being assembled by hands that know exactly how much force to apply. That data has to be captured from scratch, in the real world, across diverse environments," Agarwal says.

His firm runs 96,000 data collectors across Latin America and Southeast Asia. It filters thousands of hours of video, labels the useful content, and packages it for clients. Geography matters: Indian kitchens may not proxy well for US houses, so collectors must match the deployment environment. Some collectors also wear hardware on hands and fingers to capture physical contact.

Are workers training their replacements?

Bino Paul, senior professor at the School of Management and Labour Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, says it is too early to tell. Some workers may find AI a useful tool; robots could automate other jobs. His concern is timing. "By the time workers realise what they have participated in, things may have gone too far," he says. He wants governments to regulate AI: "AI cannot be viewed merely as a technical system. We need to develop a socio-technical system in which ethics is upheld through human agency, ensuring that AI delivers beneficence rather than maleficence."

What does the money mean on the ground?

Mohammed Arman has worked in Bangalore textiles for 10 years. "For me, it's simple. This is survival. I have a family back home in Bihar, and every rupee I send back matters. If someone offers me extra money to wear a camera while I do the exact same work I've been doing for 10 years, I'm not going to say no," he says. "It doesn't cost me anything. I'm already doing the stitching, already doing the cutting. Now I just get paid a little more for it."

Science teacher Jolly Arifur, who lives in Guntakal, Anantapur, has worn a rig-mounted camera for seven months while scrubbing, cooking, sweeping tile floors and folding laundry, fitting the work around her young son and her teaching job. "I get paid two to three dollars per hour. If I record three to five hours a day, that's a good amount in hand it's become an extra source of income for me, on top of teaching. I'm managing both honestly, fantastically," she says.

Can India keep more of the value?

Agarwal is blunt about where the money sits. "India's current role in this industry is largely as a supplier of raw material - people strap on cameras, record themselves doing ordinary tasks, and that footage gets shipped off to labs abroad," he says. He warns that collection work will lose value as more companies compete for contracts, and argues India must move up the chain — from raw video to owning the pipeline that cleans, structures and validates training data, and ultimately sets the standards for what counts as high quality. Until that shift happens, the pattern is fixed: while demand exists, someone somewhere will strap on a camera for a few dollars a day.