Dinesh Raj, who lives in the southern Indian city of Salem, treasures his account on microwork website Amazon Mechanical Turk, even if competition for data annotation tasks on the crowdsourced platform is high and the pay is low.
The 30-year-old, who has an engineering degree, has struggled to find a well-paid job and relies on the platform for much of his income, which can vary every day.
"I work at night, when there are more jobs from U.S. clients," said Raj, who has done tasks on Amazon MTurk for about four years.