BehanVox: Love, Actually
This week in BehanVox: the care work behind AI machines, Lakhpati didi promises, and more
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We have plenty of exciting reads this week. We bring you the next story in our investigations into the opaque world of data work. Another analysis of the Budget and what it means for gender-linked schemes. And a wonderful Valentine’s Day essay on unbounded desire.
Story So Far
They are ghostly figures on the farthest margins of the digital labour that feeds Artificial Intelligence. Most of them are faceless figures working from laptops and phones out of their homes, earning a livelihood they desperately need but constrained by the need for flexible hours. Some have the advantage of formal employment, an office and structure. But at the end of the day, data workers work and live in precarity, nurturing the very same technology that will make them redundant any day.
It was not the easiest world to investigate but we were intrigued enough by its hidden corners to want a closer look. So Saumya Kalia had set out to understand exactly who data workers are and who employs them and under what conditions so that we can then explore its inner workings. Last October, we published our first story, an introduction to this invisibilised labour that few of us know anything about.
We found that this labour feeds transnational forums like ChatGPT, Instagram, and the internet so that they seem like the work of automatons but are actually the product of efficient human intervention. Workers are reeled in mostly over the internet, especially social media, and they have few ideas where the product of their effort goes or who they interact with at times. They could be scrubbing content for graphic images or cleaning an Excel sheet with 500 rows of data. The wages are paltry, irregular and workers have little negotiating power in this opaque system.
This allowed us to shed light on the hidden architecture of intelligent machines and chatbots and platforms and how the intelligence of AI and machine learning rests on an invisible workforce of people who collect, clean, and create data. We decided to push further and turn to the lives of workers, whose tasks demand attention, context, judgment, and emotional endurance. None of this is valued, respected or rewarded as it should be, we found.
Muskan, just a little over 40, has taken on a freelance gig with a local NGO that is building a women’s sexual and reproductive health chatbot. First, she learnt to iterate small sentences and then she started playing around with emotions to reflect concern or urgency. Then the scripts became longer, on issues of pregnancy, fertility, family planning, which she would narrate with enunciations. She fumbled at times, asked her children to practice with her, but kept going.
Without her emotional and linguistic labour–her voice, accent, pacing and emotional delivery–the final AI chatbot cannot reliably interact with users, who are the women from her slum.
Muskan took on this work because it promised flexibility and other jobs needed qualifications she did not have. She was a teacher but the effort of juggling carework with work schedules was draining her: waking at 4am, cooking for the family, packing, and the long commute; all to be repeated in reverse order in the evening. “This work feels much better…sitting at home and getting the same payment as other work.” Her current AI gig may go on for three more months, or six, if she’s lucky. Her husband is an auto driver, and with rising costs and their children’s education fees, the two still struggle but try to make ends meet.
It is not that this work is meant to be essentially numbing but it has been made so because it requires little engagement and is done without transparency, we found. This leaves no room for meaning or creativity in the labour. This and many such complex layers of challenges emerged in our investigations.
Read our story here.
Last week, we analysed Budget 2026-27 to understand what it means for rural women’s employment. We had concluded that the cuts to the MGNREGA funds will impact the most vulnerable sections of the country – rural women in the informal work sector from mostly poor states. And that this imbalance stood to benefit urban men and their employment opportunities.
This week we look at what the budget means for women and marginalised groups in general. We found that there are fewer resources – or at best marginally more – for schemes that affect their lives in critical ways: water and sanitation, housing, rural roads, safety, education, food security, programmes for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, for instance.
Read our analysis here.
Valentine’s Day is often referred to as “Hallmark holiday” for the barrage of sentimental gee gaws peddled to us as the perfect expression of love. The soaring price of roses has apparently taken all the fun out of the festivity. But we choose not to be cynical, certainly not about what love and desire mean in our lives, even when they transgress the boundaries of convention and morality.
We published this week a delectable story from the recently published book edited by Paromita Vohra, Love, Sex and India: The Agents of Ishq Anthology. ‘Jeep Mein Beep, Dil Mein Dhak’ is a personal essay written by journalist Kavita Devi Bundelkhandi, it is a stirring read on why desire must always have room to bloom and how it takes a crazy kind of courage to defy the fear society instils in us.
Read the essay here.
Talking Point
No State For Love: While the rest of the country celebrates love, in Manipur, couples who defied the Meitei-Kuki divide are living in fear, reports The Times of India. Ever since violence reignited in the state and a Meitei man married to a Kuki was killed on camera a month ago, men and women have been forced to flee in opposite directions, either to the valley or the hills depending on their community, says the report.
Gender Guide: ‘Handbook on Combating Gender Stereotypes’ put together two years ago under the oversight of the former chief justice, DY Chandrachud to help judges and lawyers, is too ‘Harvard-oriented’ and technical, according to CJI Surya Kant. The handbook was written in the wake of an insensitive Allahabad judgement related to a rape case. The National Judicial Academy at Bhopal has been asked to gather a panel of domain experts to reframe the guidelines. This is then to be used to train judges in person.
Another Lakhpati Promise: After ‘didi’, it is now the turn of the ‘bitiya’. This week, the Delhi government announced the ‘Lakhpati Bitiya Yojana’ to provide education-linked financial support to girls from birth till graduation. Eligible beneficiaries will be given phased deposits of up to Rs 56,000, which will grow over time into a maturity amount of more than Rs 1 lakh, credited directly to the beneficiary’s Aadhaar-linked bank account. Schemes like these tend to stumble for want of clarity and intent, we have found. The catchy title apart, the Lakhpati Didi initiative has not really been able to increase income generation among beneficiaries, we had reported.
Bhojpuri Ban: The Bihar government has ordered a ban on “obscene and double-meaning” Bhojpuri songs in buses, autos, trucks, e-rickshaws, or any public place. The police have been ordered to file an FIR if the order is flouted. The songs, the state says, have a negative impact on women and children. Ironically, this stream of Bhojpuri music is often used by political parties to muster crowds and there are instances of such musicians being given tickets by political parties.
Data Drop
What does ‘Nari Shakti’ look like in numbers? Economist Varna Sri Raman analysed for us how programs for ‘women empowerment’ have constantly been underfunded and deprioritised in budgetary allocations. Take the Palna creche scheme: it 1,000 creches enrolling 20,000 children. Is that adequate? India has more than 125 million children under 6 years of age. The gap between need and provision is not marginal.
Funds are shifting from programmes serving rural women to programmes serving urban men, she found.
BehanVox Recommends
As India prepares to host the AI Impact conference in the coming week, we set you up with some essential readings and then some.
Vigil with ChatGPT: Maya Ranganathan writes a moving meditation on caregiving, grief, and the unexpected intimacies of artificial intelligence in the India Forum. As she keeps vigil beside her dying mother in Chennai, Ranganathan finds herself turning to ChatGPT for clarity, reassurance, and language when medical systems and human support fall short.
Feminist Video Games: Maddie Myers is done. The gaming sphere has nothing for a queer feminist like her and so she has taken matters in her own hands and is building a new games focussed publication: Mothership. It is everything we can get behind- independent, worker owned and unapologetically feminist. Huzzah!
All My Relations: Our community manager Anjali recommends we listen to this podcast that has them hooked. It is hosted by two native American women — Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip), and Temryss Lane (Lummi Nation) who explore their relationships— to land, to our creatural relatives, and to one another.
When Goa Dawned Red: A dominant narrative of a state usually cements itself in public memory. Like Goa, for instance, as a glitzy tourist destination. But Goa has a multiplicity of histories- one of them is its long forgotten communist history. Soniya Pondcar painstakingly rummages through the archives and brings us this story. Soniya also interns with us, so we are very proud.
Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.
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