In the narrative of India’s AI success story, a dissonant counter-chorus emerges where workers are both its enablers and its casualties. Even as India’s self-congratulatory discourse positions the nation as a rising AI superstar, its hidden producers of data, the new industrial proletariat, are forced to toil in digital sweatshops, receiving barely enough to survive on. Their aspirations to join the ranks of “knowledge workers,” as defined in industry discourse, are thwarted when they find themselves employed in menial, demeaning tasks such as labelling and verifying AI content or annotating images. This article argues that AI-driven work creates a class divide between knowledge and digital workers, with data labourers bearing the burden of powering the AI economy.