The ongoing COVID-19 situation has already had far-reaching effects on several sectors in India since the first positive cases were reported in early March 2020. Apart from nearly paralyzing the nation’s healthcare system, it has also made a tremendous blow on employment options.
Everyone from the top brass in affected sectors such as logistics and manufacturing to workers in the essential services category are looking for work-from-home jobs. Because personal safety and professional security have become the most important factors.
While some of the current jobs are remote work-friendly, others are not. This calls for a look at the best work-from-home jobs that you can do in India.
Best Work from Home Jobs: 17 Great Ideas
Based on your skillset and exposure, pick one or more of these easy online jobs and start hustling today.
- Freelance Writing
A list of the best work-from-home jobs is incomplete without the mention of freelance writing. It is still one of the easiest and most profitable ways to earn money in India. More than anything, there is no capital requirement. You just need a working computer and the ability to compose grammatically-correct sentences to start.
As a freelance writer, you are expected to write content across formats and types. The request can come in for anything: a short guide on online shopping or a long-form journalistic opinion editorial on COVID-19’s effect on India Inc. The pay will also depend on the types and formats apart from the quality that you can deliver.
You can register on sites like Upwork and Freelancer to begin your hunt for such writing jobs that can be done from home.
Earning Potential: INR 100 to INR 2,000 a day.
- App Testing
This can either be an entirely technical job suited only for professional app testers or a generic one where an app needs to be tested from a user perspective. In both cases, you can work from home as you just need a working mobile phone and steady access to the internet.
Once you sign up for an app testing project, you will be assigned a mobile app to test for bugs and UI/UX issues. The pay will be dependent on the quality of your assessment as well as the number of bugs you detect.
For generic app testing, you just need to share your objective thoughts about the app. These will be used by the R&D department to fix them and further improve the app.
For more clarity, take the example of Sulekha, a young banker who was told to work part-time from April 2020 as a cost-cutting measure. Today, she uses her free time to tests financial and fintech apps and earns a few thousand every week.
Earning Potential: Up to INR 5,000 per app. Higher for technical testing.
- Instagram Management
Even in the age of TikTok, Helo, and Snapchat, image-sharing site Instagram has managed to stay on top. One of the reasons is its huge userbase. People who signed up for it when it launched years ago continue to use it, only helped by Facebook’s subsequent takeover.
Due to this massive activity within its walls, Instagram is still one of the top social platforms in the world. Naturally, it has also caused a spike in demand for profile management professionals.
As an Instagram manager, you will look after your client’s profile – from direct messages (DMs) to caption writing to profile verification to spam control. It is an end-to-end online job where your performance will be measured in how much engagement you can garner.
Although a very competitive field, sites like Upwork and Freelancer have hundreds of job postings every day looking for able Instagram managers.
Earning Potential: Up to INR 50,000 per month.
- Essential Food Cook
Local markets are running with low staff, DMart and Big Bazaar have moved to a coupon system and operate only within strict timings, and some food items have almost disappeared from the world. As an aspirant with some culinary skills, you can take advantage of this ‘gap’ in the essential food supply.
This is not an online job where you mimic the tons of online cookery shows that are already present across the web. You just take a leaf out of their textbook and focus on a niche.
Essential foods and nostalgia. No?
The idea is to focus on recipes for essential foods like homemade bread, tawa pulao, and simple biriyani that your viewers can learn from you and try at home. You should try to limit the ingredients to bare essentials so that every household can try them.
Starting a YouTube channel and posting one simple recipe a week with a title like “Simple Lockdown Home Recipe #1 – Veg Fried Rice” should be enough to get going.
Earning Potential: It will be a while before you can earn a part of the advertising revenue from YouTube. But when you do, it can be upwards of INR 10,000 a month if you manage to rack up millions of views.
- General Instructor
Think about all the senior citizens of the country. Then think about their haplessness during this coronavirus situation. Does your social working vein tickle with you an idea?
It is to act as a general instructor to those in need. You can be an instructor of anything: online shopping, home exercise, doing taxes, and watching a movie online. The goal is to be a helping hand to aged people and let them lead a normal life in this time of abnormality.
Look out for such people in and around your housing society who may also be afraid to ask for help. A bit of proactiveness is needed on your part to succeed in this remote job.
- Financial Assistance
With banks running on low staff and online customer care asking you to hold the line, there is an influx of bank-related and other financial queries from customers. Although the fiscal year has been conveniently shifted by three months, people still need tax planning for the 2020-2021 fiscal year.
All these requests are opportunities for you to tackle as an independent contractor. But you will need to be a qualified finance person (with a relevant degree and/or experience) to be able to take up these remote jobs.
You will be expected to get on a video call with your clients and guide them through their requirements. It can be helping them access the I-T website and execute a task or helping them with their mutual funds portfolio.
Earning Potential: INR 500 to INR 5,000 per consultation.
- Product Reviewing / Amazon Affiliate Marketing
Another great way to earn money in India is to explore product reviewing as a job. Here you either host a website and publish longform review content there or target ecommerce sites and post your reviews directly on the platforms.
The first option is a long-term strategy and money will start entering your pocket only in the final stages. But if you are looking for quick money, helping agencies and other websites with product reviews is the easy way out. Here you are essentially working as a freelance writer but with a more product-centric approach. You may also need to research the product online and even use it if possible.
Earning Potential: Up to INR 40,000 per month through your own website. INR 500 to INR 1,000 per day when working for other affiliate marketers.
- Proofreading and Editing
Similar to the #1 online job on this list, editing work is easy to get. Just sign up on sites like Constant Content, Pepper Content, or QuillBridge, showcase your content editing and proofreading abilities, and land projects.
You will be required to make line editing or rewriting depending upon the type and quality of the content. You can demand a higher price if you have already done similar types of work.
Pro Tip – Cactus Communications is perhaps the best company to start your formal content editing job.
Earning Potential: Up to INR 5,000 a week.
- Take an Online Class
Have a skill that is suddenly in great demand these days?
Are you a power user of Microsoft Teams or Zoom? If yes, you can maybe create an online course of the popular video calling app and help managers in the corporate world make optimum use in their virtual workspace.
Tips and tricks around everything are easily available online. Therefore, you will have to make your course unique by giving out special tips and tricks that are not available in the public domain yet. Charging a small fee (a few hundred rupees) will also help you earn on the side.
Earning Potential: INR 100 and upwards per user per session.
- Tableau Expert
If there is one data visualization software that is making waves on the web then it is Tableau. It is being used by everyone from scientists to data analysts to project managers to add visualization to their content. Despite its popularity, it is still a skill that is rare in India.
If you are ready to spend some time to educate yourself and get trained online, Tableau can be a great choice. Even after this healthcare crisis is over, you will be reaping its benefits.
Earning Potential: Up to INR 10,000 per deck.
- Data Entry Jobs
If you already have a full-time job and are only looking for a side hustle, then a data entry job will be perfect. Just spend a few hours every day working on data transportation and earn money at the end of projects.
The pay will be low but at least it will be a secondary income for you.
- Pitch and Write Stories
For the creative person in you, this lockdown period is a great opportunity to write fictional stories and submit them to popular websites. If access to such sites is limited, you can upload your stories on Wattpad and gain some audience.
Who knows how your stories are received by your audience? And who can predict if one of them is not a publisher?
Making money through this activity may be difficult but at the end of it, you will at least have a portfolio to showcase.
- Online Tutoring
Schools and colleges are shut in all states and union territories across India. The timing is even more dangerous as students were supposed to appear for their final exams this summer. Exams may or may not happen this year. And in the best-case scenario, most students in and below eighth grade will be automatically pushed to the next level.
However, students will still lose months of education. Parents are anxious but they are occupied with their own work-from-home jobs. What can they do?
They may not think this, but you definitely can. Use your free time to become an online tutor for kids in your circles. Teach arithmetic to the three-year-old kid of your friend’s friend or take English lessons for your cousin’s niece who is in the seventh grade. Whatever you do, just teaching one student for an hour a day can help you earn good money by the time this lockdown is over.
Just make sure that your concepts on the subjects that you take up are clear enough.
Earning Potential: INR 500 to INR 5,000 per month per student.
- IT Support
Most people dismiss this as a non-remote work but it is not true. You can still support a business’s network and information technology requirements via videoconferencing and virtual network computing (VNC).
Rohit, for instance, is a senior network engineer at a marketing agency. He not only supports the agency’s 500-member team’s IT requirements but also freelances for a few hours every day. In his second job, he handles server-level work for a 10-member company. This earns him roughly INR 5,000 a week, which is enough to take care of his individual needs (as a bachelor) for an entire month.
Although remote IT work is a physically toiling job, it is extremely rewarding and in-demand.
Earning Potential: INR 5,000 per week and upwards.
- Stock Trading
There won’t be a better time to try your hand at stock trading. Whether you choose to do intra-day trading or buy and sell stocks for long-term gains, it can be a fantastic way to earn money. With capital as low as INR 500, you can start this activity as early as today (provided the market hasn’t closed down).
The only thing you need is some expendable money that you can spend as you enter the lucrative world of Sensex and NIFTY50.
Zerodha is a friendly stock trading app that you can explore. It also has an academy to help you with training.
- Remote Insurance Agent
Insurance is a funny subject because everyone knows that they need it but they still hesitate to buy one. The good thing right now is that this healthcare emergency has helped some of them understand the importance of health insurance.
As an agent, you can start canvassing health insurance in your circles and earn a commission on each purchase. The easiest way to do this is to contact any insurance provider (LIC, for example) and register yourself as an agent.
Payments are extremely transparent and you can earn as much as you want.
Earning Potential: Commission from 2% to 40% of monthly/annual insurance premium (in Indian rupees).
- TikTok Star
This is a unique job that will depend on your creativity. Choose any topic that you like, produce short TikTok videos, and share them across your circles. The higher your popularity and reach the more likes and shares your videos will garner.
Within a short period of time, you can transform into a TikTok star and reap the benefits of the platform’s revenue system.
Make sure your videos have a unique quality in them in order to gain maximum attention. Use your social media strength to promote and market your videos.
The possibilities of earning money online without investment are endless. People in India are known for their unique moneymaking skills. And some of them are listed above.
But don’t limit yourself to these freelance jobs. Assess your own skills, find a relevant job, and begin the journey of remote working today.
