No doubt you have heard :
Give fish to a man and you
would feed him for a day. Teach him how to catch fish and you would feed him
for life
Earlier, I have mentioned
this in my following e-mail :
Ø Universal
Basic Income …………………. 20 Jan 2017
Extract :
WHAT
WOULD BE THE RIGHT APPROACH ?
* Right approach would be : " Do not give fish to a hungry man / teach him
how to
fish "
In short , empower them to earn their own living by teaching them " Skills "
and
by
Government , till
employed or becomes self-employed
Should he choose to become Self-Employed ( by registering as a " Start Up " ),
exempt him from paying Personal Income Tax for next 10 years
What reminded me about this ?
Following news report :
“Men Will Take It": Rahul Gandhi's Taunt Over ₹ 1 Lakh To Women Promise ..
NDTV … 07 May 2024
Extract :
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi reiterated his
party's promise today that they would give ₹ 1 lakh annually to poor women if voted to power.
He reiterated as > Rs 8500 / month ( month after month )
“ May be the men will not like what I am saying
but it's a fact and this is why we are going to put ₹ 1 lakh in
women's bank accounts," said Mr Gandhi, highlighting Congress' proposed
scheme for 'Nari Nyay'.
My Take
:
How many “ poor women “ are there ?
My guess :
Govt is giving FREE ration to 80 CRORE poor
persons . Say , 4 persons per family, so 20 crore families
Each such “ poor family “ is likely to have ONE
“ poor woman “
That makes for 20 Crore “ poor women “
Now shri Gandhi will give, each of these “ poor
women “ , Rs 1 lakh
every year ( a dole , no doubt )
That adds upto ( Rs 20 crore x 1 lakh = Rs 20 lakh*crore / year )
This is approx. same amount that Govt got by
way of GST in
ENTIRE YEAR 23-24
at Rs 20.18 lakh*crore !
So , Shri Gandhi’s proposal would require
entire GST collection to be given to 20 crore “ poor women “ , leaving nothing
for other SOCIAL BENEFIT SCHEMES / Infrastructure / Agriculture etc
And year after year ! Life long
I don’t think this is a good idea – making
these women “ dependent “ on this “ hand out “ from Sarkar Maa-Baap
A better idea would be to use this money for
putting into the hands of these women , some “ TOOLS “ , using which, they
could “ earn their livelihood “ , in a descent / honest / respectful manner
Take a look at the
following short ( obviously incomplete ) list :
|
Nature of Work these women can do |
Tool / Equipment / Asset needed |
Approx cost of such an Asset |
|
|
|
|
|
Annotation /
Meta-tagging for AI |
Laptop |
Rs 30,000 |
|
Sewing /
Embroidery / Tailoring |
Sewing /
Embroidery Machine |
Rs 90,000 |
|
Beautician /
Pedicure / Manicure / Hair Dressing |
Set of Cosmetics
& Devices |
Rs 15,000 – Rs
100,000 |
|
Street Vendors (
incl Vegetables ) |
A 4 wheeled Cart |
Rs 10,000 |
|
Home Food Service |
Solar Panel + Solar
Cooker |
Rs 150,000 |
|
Record/translate
Indian Languages for AI LLM developers / Typing |
Laptop + Printer |
Rs 50,000 |
|
Knitting |
Only working
capital for materials |
Rs 50,000 |
|
Making Flower
Garlands ( Florist ) |
“ |
Rs 10,000 |
|
Driving E
Rickshaws |
E Rickshaw |
Rs 200,000 |
|
Drone Operating
for Agriculture |
Drone |
Rs 100,000 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Already , we have as of now, some 92 lakh SHG ( Self Help
Groups ) having some 10.28 crore poor women as members, under Central Govt’s “ Lakhpati Didi “ scheme
All that I have to recommend to PM Shri Modiji
, is to :
Ø Include
this Lakhpati Didi project in his 100 DAY ROAD-MAP
Ø Set
a target to raise membership from current 10 Cr to 20
Cr , by May 2026
Ø Enable
all SHG to register on ONDC , to enable buyers (
of Goods / Services produced by these SHGs
) to be able to search / find these SHGs and place orders ( SHG to
receive payments , online )
Ø Incentivize AI related Start ups to train specific SHG
members in Annotating / Meta-tagging
Ø Amend IT act so that the expense incurred by Corporate
in GIFTING / DONATING , tools – equipment – assets etc to any SHG , will
qualify against CSR obligation of such a
corporate
Ø In
addition to this, treat all SHGs as “ Charitable
Organizations “. Any donation made to any SHG should qualify for
deduction under 80 G
provision , without ANY LIMIT, either
for SHG concerned or for the DONOR concerned. Also change the condition of
having to spend all donated income within next 12 months to “ next 24 months “
Ø For
grant of loans to members of SHGs ( whether for Capital Assets or for Working
Capital ), simplify procedures and raise the
limits as shown in the last column of tabulation above . Loans must get
disbursed within 4 weeks
of application by an SHG member – and must be collateral free
Ø Set
target for BharatNet to provide OFC internet
connections to all SHG registered address, by 2027
Ø Set
target for all DISCOMS ( which are currently providing electric power to
SHG member homes ), to ensure installation of a 3
Kw Roof-top Solar Installations , under
SuryaGhar Yojana, to such homes by Dec 2025 ( inclusive of Net Metering connection ). The cost to
be borne by the SHG member ( over the max subsidy amount of Rs 78,000 ), should
be in the form of a loan at an interest rate of 4 % and repayable over a period
of 5 years ( with a grace period of ONE year )
Ø Last – and the MOST IMPORTANT reform needed to increase 3 crore Lakhpati
Didis to 20 crore , and, in the process, launch what PM Shri Modiji has
envisioned as a CREATIVE ECONOMY , please implement :
A NEW
ECONOMIC ORDER ? aka " Start Up Act - 2015 "……12 Sept 2015
Human Resource Capital of the World ? .. ...... 20 Nov 2020
" BACK FACTORY " OF THE WORLD ?..............09 Sept 2015
With
regards,
Hemen
Parekh
www.HemenParekh.ai / 28
May 2024
Related Readings :
Ø Indian gig workers toil at frontlines of AI revolution … ET … 06 May 2024
Extract :
Akash Pandey (26), a government job aspirant
hailing from Basti, Uttar Pradesh, chanced upon a flexible work opportunity
online, which could fetch him Rs 12,000-13,000 per project for transcribing audio and marking objects in
images
Thousands of gig workers like Pandey and
Nagar are becoming the backbone for training artificial intelligence-based
large language models (LLMs) by taking up micro-tasks
such as transcribing audio files, labelling images, translating language, as well as marking boxes to
identify objects in a self-driving clip and the best responses generated by a
chatbot.
India is fast emerging as a hub for data annotation services with flexible workers, mid-tier business analysts and even skilled data engineers contributing to build high-quality datasets.
Data
annotation, or simply data labelling, is the
most crucial and foundational step for building high-quality datasets to
train AI models, enhance accuracy,
curtail hallucinations and build safety guardrails against inappropriate or
harmful content.
As per industry estimates, by 2028, the global market for data annotations will be valued at $ 8.22 billion predicted to grow at 26.2% annually. Of this, the market serviced by India can exceed $7 billion by 2030 with a workforce of up to 1 million.
According to HR services company TeamLease,
20,000 full-time workers are engaged in the managed services paradigm as
annotators in India. Across international platforms, 50,000 Indian annotators
are actively employed as independent contractors.
“Annotation-as-a-service is on a meteoric rise
especially in India,” said Alok Aggarwal, a celebrated author and chief
executive of AI startup ScryAI.
There are more than 400,000 annotators
worldwide. The number is
expected to double every three
years, thereby having
almost 6 million workers
in this field by 2040, he said.
Global AI companies Databricks, Fractal,
Tredence and startups like Cropin and Minus Zero said they are expanding the
team of in-house experts for faster, cost-effective data annotation while also
depending on outsourced services in India.
“For the entire MLOps (machine learning
operations) pipeline, human-in-the-loop is crucial for handling biases,
ensuring accuracy and reliability,” said Rajesh Ramdas, senior director, field
engineering, Databricks India. The San Francisco-based data analytics and AI company
has recently released a DBRX 132-billion parameter model.
“As more and more software programming is taken
over by generative AI and new demands for labelling data to train the most
complex AI models emerges, I see a lot of workforce shifting to this domain,”
he said.
Chennai-based Desicrew Solutions, which counts
Uber, Disney Hotstar and Toyota as clients, said it has grown on an average at 50% over the past 3-4 years,
driven by the increasing demand for annotation for LLMs. Further, the need for
annotation and the complexity of tasks have grown significantly for training
LLMs.
Manivannan JK, Desicrew’s chief executive, said
annotation for LLMs is much more nuanced compared to classical AI or ML
systems.
“LLMs have taken it to the next level, where
they (annotators) are looking at nuances like sentiments,” he said, adding that
India offered skilled
labour in abundance with lower operating costs for such services.
The original trend started around 2003-04 with
Amazon, Walmart, Target and other ecommerce companies, which initially used
workers in India to label their products and create catalogues.
However, not all data records can be labelled by
humans.
“Self-supervised learning and the availability
of open-source datasets bring down the cost, time and effort needed for manual
tasks of sorting and marking data,” said Suraj Amonkar, chief AI research &
platforms officer at Fractal.
The company has built India’s first
text-to-image diffusion model, Kalaido.ai, trained on a public dataset of 70
million images and capable of understanding text prompts in 17 Indian languages
including Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit.
“As we are heading towards increasing complexity
of training multimodal LLMs across text, speech, image, video, code etc., especially
in low-resource languages such as those in India, skilled annotators will be
required to build ethical guardrails into these innovations,” he added.
Soumendra Mohanty, chief strategy officer at San
Jose-based data science firm Tredence, said annotation is evolving as a
sub-segment at multiple firms with minimum qualification of a business analyst
possessing domain knowledge.
Besides building foundational models,
enterprises that are fine-tuning LLMs on proprietary data in sectors such as
healthcare need specialised skills for labelling the data, said Hardik Dave,
founder and CEO of startup IndikaAI.
“ While an average labeller can make Rs 25k-30k on Flexibench, a radiologist can make up to Rs1 lakh/month for a few hours of work.”
Meanwhile, Nagar sees this as an opportunity
beyond a second income. “Annotation became a practice ground for me while I was
preparing for my NEET PG examination for specialisation. This is also an avenue
where practicing doctors can participate in innovation happening in corporate
healthcare.”
Nagar freelances with a team of professionals
and amateurs on Flexibench, a managed services platform created by AI data
startup Indika.AI. The platform hosts an on-demand workforce of 23,000
registered contributors for programmatic data labelling and fine-tuning of
foundation models.
Data annotation
outsourcing: A step-by-step guide .. 04 Jan 2023
Outsourcing Data Annotation: Challenges & Resolutions
Image
Annotation Outsourcing: A Step-by-Step Guide
Another example of how we
can Empower Women by
teaching them how to fish :
IG Drones in talks with Kerala govt to train, create drone
workforce for Gulf nations
·
BusinessLine
(Chennai) /
·
·
Delhi-based IG Drones, an end-to-end done solutions firm, is in
discussions with the Kerala Government to train and create
a drone workforce that can work in the Gulf countries, particularly
the agriculture sector. “The Kerala Government is very proactive (in creating
the workforce through training). We can also create in-house workforce who will work within the country and analyse
drone data. It will be like the 80 per cent satellite image analysis
business outsourced to India from the US and Europe,” said IG Drones
founder and CEO Bodhisattwa Sanghapriya.
Analysing drone or agricultural data could be a huge business like
the satellite imagery analysis business. “With drone data analysis, we can create a large data processing workforce in the country,” Sanghapriya said, adding that IG drones is eyeing these opportunities.
Besides Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Gujarat are proactive
in the upskilling of youth, students and farmers in drone technology.
IG Drones, which produced its first drone within days of being
launched in 2018 in view of the founders’ experience in building rockets, has trained about 10,000 farmers
with the latest drone technology.
In particular, the agriculture drone industry can emerge as a key
sector for India in outsourcing drone operations and
for data analysis of agricultural lands, he told
business-line in an online interaction.
“Just like Infosys and TCS have done in the BPO sector, I think
the drone sector can also play a role in that direction by creating a workforce to operate drones. We can
actually go to all African countries, West Asian countries and even to Europe. We can actually export our
skilled workforce (in drones) there,” Sanghapriya said.
There is a huge shortage of drone pilots and the recent
introduction of the Drone
Didi scheme will only increase the problem.
However, companies such as IG Drones have identified the manpower
shortage problem and are trying to create a workforce like the IT majors. The
company has entered into partnerships with National Skill Development
Corporation, FICCI and other such organisations, including skill development
councils, to train people in operating drones.
The drone company has emerged as one of the
largest skill development firms, particularly in
upskilling and reskilling in drone technology.
“We have an ambitious plan of upskilling 10
million youth with the latest drone technology. We have started
experimenting with different kinds of students in drone technology,” he said.
IG Drones, which has offices in Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar
and Mumbai besides Delhi, has identified students of industrial training
institutes (ITI) as more suitable for training in drone technology.
It has trained 5,000 ITI students so far and rolled out a course for them with the results being
“impressive”.
Just like Infosys and TCS have done in the BPO sector, the drone
sector can play a role in that direction by creating a workforce to operate drones
BODHISATTWA SANGHAPRIYA
CEO, IG DRONES
Article Name:
IG Drones in talks with Kerala govt to train, create drone
workforce for Gulf nations
Publication: BusinessLine (Chennai)
Startup PediaStartup Pedia176,636 followers176,636
followers1d •
1 day ago
A video is circulating on X from the farmer’s cooperative IFFCPO UP, showcasing women drone pilots. The viral video shows how rural women in Phulpur, UP are flying drones as part of the government’s Namo Drone Didi programme.
“Dry run practise of Namo drone didi was organized at
cordet hashtag#IFFCO Phulpur in presence of
DOF official. @IFFCO_PR @drusawasthi @iffcoyogendra @abhimanyuiffco”: posted
IFFCPO UP on X.
The Indian government has recently launched the “Drone Didi”
program for women in March 2024.
This initiative by the Indian government aims to train and empower 10,000 women
as drone pilots.
Uses of Drones in Agriculture:
In rural India, women are bridging agricultural gaps
with drones.
As drone pilots, rural women are doing farming tasks, such as planting seeds, monitoring
crop health, and applying fertilisers and
pesticides efficiently.
Take Ambika
Rana from Haryana, for example.
She was the first woman in her district authorised to
fly a drone, earning her the nickname “Drone Didi.”
This job has brought her financial independence and
community respect.
Similarly, Kajal Kumari from Bihar, who was once a homemaker, now supports
her family by spraying crops with a drone, earning
up to Rs 75,000 a month during the crop season.
A Win-Win
Solution?
Although women drone pilots praise its benefits, for
example, drones use
significantly less water than manual spraying (10 litres/ acre vs 200 litres/ acre) but
they’re often used to spray chemical pesticides.
This raises environmental concerns.
The challenge is to use this technology in eco-friendly
ways.
Can drones be used to apply organic treatments or other
sustainable solutions? Let us know in the comments.
Social Media Reaction:
Users on X celebrate "women empowerment" in response
to a video showcasing rural women using drones for farm tasks.
One user wrote: “True definition of Women Empowerment ”
Another user wrote: “This innovative approach not only
streamlines farming practices but also showcases the untapped potential of
women in agribusiness.
As these women navigate the skies, they are not just
pilots; they are pioneers, shaping the future of sustainable and inclusive
agriculture.”
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