My parents were both English literature graduates
And worked state government jobs.
Stable desk jobs they did for 30 odd years until they retired.
Appa never understood why I was so fascinated with Tech.
“Its like magic, Appa, look” – I remember showing him my first program.
He smiled, like only a parent could.
And stood steadfast in supporting me – driving me down to multiple interviews and dissing away relatives who were worried about marriage prospects.
Tech is truly magical in more ways than one.
For one, it is democratising – when used for good
And that is why this startup feature warms my heart.
“Before she started using this app, 30-year-old Chandrika had just 184 rupees ($2.25) in her bank account.
But in return for around six hours of work spread over several days in late April, she received 2,570 rupees ($31.30). That’s roughly the same amount she makes in a month of working as a teacher at a distant school, after the cost of the three buses it takes her to get there and back.
Unlike her day job, the app doesn’t make her wait until the end of the month for payment; money lands in her bank account in just a few hours.
Just by reading text aloud in her native language of Kannada, spoken by around 60 million people mostly in central and southern India, Chandrika has used this app to earn an hourly wage of about $5, nearly 20 times the Indian minimum.
Part of that demand comes from tech companies seeking to build out their AI tools. Another big chunk comes from academia and governments, especially in India, where English and Hindi have long held outsize precedence in a nation of some 1.4 billion people with 22 official languages and at least 780 more indigenous ones.
This rising demand means that hundreds of millions of Indians are suddenly in control of a scarce and newly-valuable asset: their mother tongue”
This cover by TIME features a nasscom Deep tech startup – Karya, founded by a Stanford Alumni, Manu Chopra, a 27 year old who has like most other folks leveraged education to move out of the poverty.
It is truly an amalgamation of all the good that tech can bring – helping bring people out of poverty whilst building an ethical and diverse dataset that helps drive responsible AI.
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Read more – https://time.com/6297403/india-ai-karya-startup/
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