BehanVox: The Grey World Of Data Workers
This week in BehanVox: Karnataka's menstrual leave policy, AI girlfriends, and more
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Hello and welcome to BehanVox! This week we bring you an exploratory dive into the shadow world of data workers and why they are not the subject of any labour policy though they power the internet and transnational economies. Also news from India and around the world.
First, the news of the Nobel Peace Prize. Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition politician wins the Nobel peace prize for 2025 “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy”. She is an interesting choice, to say the least. A hugely popular figure for uniting a once divided opposition against the Maduro regime and advocating for free and fair elections in the country, the conservative politician also has made thinly veiled military intervention by the United States to unseat Maduro. On X, she dedicated the award to “the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause!” In times of an ongoing genocide, many opined that the Nobel committee should have awarded the prize to the doctors or even journalists in Gaza.
Story So Far
BehanBox has reported on women home-based workers, an undervalued and neglected labour force wherein the women themselves do not see their labour as ‘work’ because it entwines with their daily routines of carework. We investigated the lives of the women who hold up the mega sports goods industry of Jallandhar and found that despite their significant contributions to the domestic economy, home based workers find themselves without access to training, safety equipment, or social security. They remain unrecognised by both companies and the government alike.
But there is another kind of home based work that remains even further in the shadows, barely known or acknowledged. Millions of data workers, faceless and nameless, who power the many cavernous spaces of the internet. We often think of entities such as Meta or Instagram as fully automated entities, where no human hand ever enters the supply chain of work that goes into powering them. But the truth is that just as millions of women in their homes sit refurbishing old clothes, fixing lace to mass produced outfits and stitching up footballs, an equally large number sit at their phones and computer doing repetitive, mind numbing tasks for the internet for an employer they do not know and for an end goal they are not told.
This week Saumya Kalia delves into this grey world of ghost workers. You will likely have seen glib sales pitches spammed into your message boxes or on online platforms such as YouTube and LinkedIn and Reddit offering ‘easy money’ with ‘zero investment’. But there will be no clarity on the specifics – the nature of the job, designation, working hours, or payment system.
“You can do it from your home, from your mobile phone,” says an influencer in an auto-dubbed voice, promising Rs 1 lakh a month for part-time work. And what’s better, anyone can do it – a student, a fresher, a housewife.
The task could be anything – scrub social media, clean excel sheets or label audio/video to experience Instagram without glitch – and routed digitally to a dispersed labour force. There are other kinds of data work too – curating, labelling, content moderation, AI rating, transcribing, conducting surveys.
For those desperate to seek employment in a job starved economy or unable to seek work because of social and cultural reasons, these jobs seem ideal. It is not without reason that in India alone, roughly 1 million data annotators may be active by 2028, contributing to a data annotation sector projected to grow more than $8 billion globally.
But the result, researchers argue, is the rise of “digital sweatshops” and “global digital factories” without oversight and beyond geographies. This explainer is the first in a three-part series that documents the nature and history of the “invisible” data work that makes possible the internet and AI and powers transnational economies.
Read our story here.
Talking Points
No Answers: The death of at least 22 children after consuming contaminated cough syrup and ensuing kidney failure is a pointer to the many flaws in our floundering public health system, not the least of which is a lax regulatory structure and an inability to track a spiraling crisis and stem it in time. The Drugs Controller General of India has itself highlighted shoddy processes it found during recent inspections, when manufacturers were seen to neglect fresh tests on ingredients. The disaster, which started unfurling in early September with an entire state struggling to figure out its cause, has also led to the one ‘solution’ we are now all too familiar with – political mudslinging, with no clear idea of how the authorities plan to ensure that these unavoidable deaths never happen again. As per BBC, these were not the first such deaths: two years ago, Indian cough syrups were linked to the deaths of 70 children in The Gambia and 18 in Uzbekistan. And between December 2019 and January 2020, at least 12 children under five died in Jammu and Kashmir allegedly from cough syrup intake.
Period Leave: The Karnataka government has approved a menstrual leave policy that guarantees women workers one paid leave per month during menstruation. It applies to government employees as well as those employed in the private sector. Bihar, in 1992, instituted a policy that provides women state government employees upto two days leave every month during their periods. As we had reported earlier, India and other South Asian countries need to introduce systemic reforms and schemes to ensure menstrual equity. Entire swathes of our labour force, from cane cutters to factory workers, face precarity and health crises for want of this.
Anandiben Admonishes: “Stay away, otherwise you will be found in 50 pieces” is Uttar Pradesh Governor Anandiben Patel’s advice for women who opt for a live-in relationship. Even as she claims to respect women’s right to choice, she warns against its perils, pointing for some reason to teen pregnancy. Since stories on abusive relationships emerged, BJP-led state governments (here and here) have cracked down on live-in relationships ignoring the fact that even in traditional familial set ups, one in three Indian women have reported violence.
Love, Not Actually: Remember Joi, the holographic AI girlfriend to Ryan Gosling’s character in the cult sci-fi film Blade Runner 2049? Well, we do not now have to wait for another 24 years for the idea to materialise – AI-generated ‘girlfriends’ are already here and they are guaranteed to not look or sound ordinary. According to the Guardian, “women will flirt and chat and send nude photographs and explicit videos via one of a soaring number of new adult dating websites that offer an increasingly realistic selection of AI girlfriends for subscribers willing to pay a monthly fee”.
Data Point
Numbers speak to the scale and devastation of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. But they no longer stop us in our tracks. We scroll past body counts. We process mass death through data points. These figures cannot hold the seismic violence of genocide. They also cannot capture the grief of war, and how it alters people’s bodies, memories, and futures. In this data drop, we ask you to reflect on: what counts as data?
War is a system that consolidates power and sustains the military-industrial complex. And from Palestine to Kashmir, women and gender minorities bear the brunt of conflict, in deaths, displacement, care, and survival.
Anti-war feminism, as academic Cynthia Cockburn writes, involves “a critique of the meaning and operation of power itself – women often choose to organise in prefigurative ways, exchanging ‘power over’ (domination) for ‘power to’ (capability)”. It is a position we want to actively articulate on our platforms. That is why women’s resistance, memory, and labour must be central to how war is reported and remembered.
BehanVox Recommends
Extremely Offline: A colossal volcanic eruption in January 2022 ripped apart the underwater cables that connect Tonga to the world – and exposed the fragility of 21st-century life. Samanth Subramanian’s longread is worth your time.
Strong As a Mule, Thick As a Rope: Soraya Palmer’s powerful, deeply personal essay blends memoir, medical narrative, and cultural critique to examine how racism, medical neglect, and systemic injustice shape the bodily experiences of Black women—particularly through the lens of uterine fibroids and reproductive health.
Take away our language and we will forget who we are: The late Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o believed erasing language was the most lasting weapon of oppression. In this long podcast, Aminatta Forna recalls the man and introduces his essay on decolonisation.
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