Today, 230 million people in India live in poverty and many have no way out. Karya's founder, Manu Chopra believes AI can change that.

Bengaluru

How AI is helping fight poverty in India

There are 230 million poor people in India today, more than any other country in the world. And for most of them, there is no path out of poverty. And that's obviously ridiculous. So we have to figure out a way to dramatically accelerate social mobility, and I think technology is a great way to do that. I want our generation to be the last generation that knows of a poor India. It's absurd that one in three people in the world who are poor live in India today. And we are the world's fifth richest country. And those two things just should not coexist. My name is Manoj Chopra. I am the co-founder and CEO of Karya. Karya is the Sanskrit word for work that gives you dignity. And that's exactly what we do. We bring dignified digital work to rural Indians, moving them out of poverty. And we're doing so currently by working with the global AI revolution. Every year, big tech companies spend billions of dollars collecting training data for their AI and ML models. But unfortunately, rural Indians today do not have access to this work. So we bring this work to rural communities in India, but we do so in the most ethical way possible. I believe very strongly that poverty is not a natural phenomenon. It's a man-made disease. I grew up in Shakur Basti, one of the poorer parts of Delhi. And I got very lucky. I am a product of philanthropy. The Basti school that I went to was run by an incredible trust and thus was much better than the other local schools. I got a series of scholarships and grants that took me to Stanford, where I received a phenomenal education. And in many ways, I'm here today because of the kindness and compassion of so many people that I've never met before. I feel having grown up around poverty, it's almost existential for me to work on it, right? It is like the goal of my life is to figure out how can we use technology to move people sustainably out of poverty. So imagine I want to build a Siri or a Google Assistant or a Cortana or any voice assistant in any Indian language. I need lots of data to train our models how to understand these different languages. That's the kind of work Karya workers can do. So workers sit at their homes, in their fields, wherever they are, and they download the Karya app. And all they have to do is record themselves reading out sentences in their mother tongue. So it can be as simple as that. It could be an image where they have to circle elements of interest. So it could be an image of a tree and it could say circle the coconut or something like that. And in all of these cases, our workers have to do very simple tasks on their phones. And these tasks come together to build these valuable data sets. We pay our workers 20 times the Indian minimum wage. This high wage rate allows magical things to happen, right? Like I remember the first person we ever worked with, her name is Reshma. She looked at the smartphone and said, is the sun God inside this? Because this is a village where there was no electricity. And this was our very first time seeing like a backlit source of light. I didn't say anything, but my co-founder and I were like, I don't know if this is going to work, right? Like this is the first time seeing a smartphone. And I kid you not, 30 minutes later, she came and said, why did you think this would be difficult? Like all I have to do is switch on the phone and read out sentences in my language. In the first week, she made 10,000 rupees, which was more than what her family had made all of last year. And that allowed her to dream bigger, right? She became the first girl to leave her village. Today, she is studying to be a fashion designer in Mumbai. So we have like these incredible stories of transformation that happen because money and opportunity are the only thing lacking in rural India. There's no minimum hours. It's work that pays them very, very well. It's work that ties them to their language. And in India, language and culture are deeply intertwined. Over 32,000 workers in 22 states across India have worked on the Karya platform. We've completed over 35 million paid digital tasks. We are on track to reach 100,000 workers by the end of this year. And the goal is just to do more. Over the last two years that we've been an independent nonprofit, we have been able to give roughly $800,000 in supplementary income so far, which is good, but we have a long way to go. Our goal here is 100 million rural Indians out of poverty by 2030.

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