By Musheera Ashraf
Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh: India’s national narrative is increasingly told through the dizzying metrics of a modern technological revolution. Millions of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions flash across screens every single minute, seamless online government services promise to eliminate bureaucratic hurdles, and vital welfare schemes are inextricably linked to smartphone applications. Yet, far removed from this glossy vision of a frictionless digital future—in rural pockets where mobile phones are shared among family members and digital passwords are routinely guessed—women continue to stand firmly at the margins of a world that has shifted far faster than they could ever hope to follow.
The stark reality of this gendered digital divide is evident long before the sun rises over the villages tucked away in the hinterlands of western Uttar Pradesh. Ten kilometres outside Saharanpur, thirty-five-year-old Musheera begins her daily routine before the city stirs to life. A widow navigating the quiet hardships of rural life, she boards a crowded, rattling tempo at dawn. Her destination is the local gas agency, where she hopes to find out why her government cooking gas cylinder subsidy has not reflected in her account for three consecutive months. By the time she arrives after the grueling commute, a weary queue has already formed outside the locked gates, composed mostly of other women sharing similar grievances.
When her turn finally arrives, agency staff offer a blunt explanation: she will only receive her pending subsidy if she purchases a new gas pipe, which they insist is now strictly mandatory. Musheera blinks in disbelief, the demand catching her completely off guard. "I changed the pipe just a month ago. I do not need it," she protests quietly. The response from behind the counter is flat, rehearsed, and completely dismissive: "It is mandatory. Even if you do not need it now, you can use it later."
The forced purchase costs her two hundred rupees—roughly equivalent to the cost of a full day’s meals for her family of four. It is a severe financial blow borne out of a system she has no power to question or bypass.
Musheera carries a second-hand mobile phone that she managed to purchase for twenty-five hundred rupees, a sum she paid off through difficult installments. "A phone is necessary now. Even if we skip a meal, we have to keep a phone," she explains, highlighting the inescapable social pressure to remain connected even when basic sustenance is at stake.
However, her ownership of the device is largely symbolic. She can only use it to receive incoming calls and dial her daughter, who lives in another village. For everything else, she is forced to rely on the shopkeeper next door, even for the routine task of booking her LPG gas cylinder. When asked how she manages to remember her daughter’s phone number without being able to read or write, she laughs shyly, revealing a simple mnemonic: "Akhir me do zero hain"—there are two zeroes at the end.
Across rural India, women universally depend on neighbours, local shopkeepers, and male family members to execute the most basic digital tasks. These helping hands, almost exclusively male, handle everything from booking cooking gas to verifying subsidy statuses. While trust fills the vast void left by systemic digital illiteracy, it is a precarious arrangement fraught with hidden risks.
In another nearby household, an elderly woman found herself continuously harassed by phone calls from strangers because a male relative had casually used her phone number to register multiple unvetted online accounts. "I had no idea why people were calling me by someone else’s name," recalls sixty-two-year-old Savitri. These incidents may seem minor when viewed against the sweeping backdrop of India’s national digital push, but they powerfully illustrate how easily the boundary between fragile trust and deep personal vulnerability blurs in rural communities.
A decade into the ambitious Digital India mission, a persistent gendered digital divide continues to dictate the terms of modern citizenship, deciding rigidly who gets to fully participate and who must remain locked outside the door. Data indicates that nearly forty per cent fewer rural women own smartphones compared to their male counterparts. Among the women who do manage to secure ownership of a device, a significant majority lack genuine control over its usage, content, or privacy.
This divide becomes even sharper when examining digital finance. Men in rural and semi-urban areas are substantially more likely to perform UPI transactions, with a documented gap of 13.7 percentage points. Official national UPI statistics frequently obscure this underlying disparity because transaction volumes are not systematically broken down by gender. However, industry insiders working within the country’s payment ecosystem readily acknowledge the stark imbalance.
In 2023, a senior Google Pay official publicly noted that women constituted less than thirty percent of active UPI users. The following year, a representative from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) echoed a remarkably similar estimate. In deeper semi-urban and rural areas, those percentages plummet even further.
The hesitation to embrace digital finance is rooted in profound anxiety. A fifty-year-old schoolteacher living in Saharanpur has a fully functional UPI application installed on her smartphone, yet she steadfastly refuses to use it. "What if the money goes to the wrong person? Who will return it to me?" she asks, voicing a terror of irreversible digital errors. Whenever she needs to make a digital payment, she must hand her device over to her son. "If something goes wrong, I will be blamed. Better not to try," she adds, encapsulating the pervasive fear of punitive social judgment.
Fear serves as an unseen yet immensely powerful barrier. Many rural women articulate a clear preference for physical cash, not because they lack general awareness of modern conveniences, but because they completely lack the confidence required to navigate potential pitfalls. They have heard distressing stories of financial fraud, stolen passwords, accidental transaction reversals, and phones getting permanently blocked after too many failed security attempts. For them, a digital mistake carries social and financial consequences that feel far heavier and more permanent than physical ones.
Sita, a thirty-year-old newly married woman, sums up her reality with quiet resignation. She has never once booked her own LPG cylinder. "My husband does it. I do not have a phone," she states plainly. When she uses his device at all, it is strictly to watch entertainment videos on YouTube. "If something goes wrong, I will have to hear from everyone," she remarks, pointing to the constant surveillance and criticism women face when they step outside traditional boundaries.
This acute fear of making an error is not an imagined psychological hurdle. It is systematically shaped by years of conditioning—of being repeatedly told to exercise caution, of being unfairly blamed for domestic or financial errors, and of having virtually no safe room to experiment or learn from mistakes. Meanwhile, digital public infrastructure continues to expand at a relentless pace. Welfare schemes are inextricably linked to mobile applications, government subsidies require periodic online updates, SIM cards demand mandatory revalidation, and banks rigidly insist on continuous digital KYC compliance. Each added technological layer demands a level of digital confidence that many rural women have simply never been allowed to build.
Online content creators frequently capture adjacent layers of this broader reality. Recently, an Instagram creator using the handle @lifeofpuja addressed her followers in a viral video, observing that "no matter how much she works or how many followers she earns, she is still known as someone’s wife or daughter-in-law." Rural women echo this exact sentiment in quieter, more localized ways. They rarely receive recognition for attempting to learn new digital skills, and their primary social identity remains firmly tied to the patriarchal household rather than their personal technological competencies.
Civil society organizations working on the ground emphasize that the crisis is not merely about a lack of basic literacy, but about systemic dependence and compromised safety. According to representatives from Sarvothanam, a Delhi-based organization dedicated to online safety and digital literacy training, the danger runs deep. "Women who do not know how to use their phones rely entirely on others. But the very same people can easily misuse their access. Personal photos, private messages, and even their confidential OTPs are shared without them truly understanding what is happening," a member of the organization explains.
Despite these formidable structural hurdles, pockets of grassroots change are slowly unfolding. In a village situated near Deoband, Rahima, who proudly stands as the first college graduate in her family, spends her time attempting to teach basic digital literacy tasks to her mother and the other women in her neighborhood. "I tell them how to open SMS messages, how to find saved contacts, and how to identify suspicious links," she shares. It is slow, painstaking work, but it is labor driven fundamentally by care, empathy, and a desire to protect rather than fear.
Parveen, a social worker operating in the rural expanses of Saharanpur in western Uttar Pradesh, asserts that the path forward requires an intensive approach featuring extensive handholding, sustained community-level training, and dedicated women-led digital learning circles. "Digital empowerment is not only about handing over a device. It is about making women feel safe, confident, and in control of their own lives," notes a digital rights volunteer active in the same region.
India’s overarching digital journey is racing ahead at full speed, but a significant portion of its population is still forced to walk carefully behind it. The women inhabiting these villages are not offering ideological resistance to modern technology; rather, they are desperately trying to navigate an accelerated world that moved forward far faster than their access, their digital confidence, and their institutional trust.
For these women, true autonomy is not measured in apps successfully installed or financial transactions smoothly completed. Instead, it is measured in quiet, personal victories—answering a text message without asking for assistance, checking a cooking gas subsidy status independently for the very first time, or daring to press a digital button without the crippling fear of failure. And until these modest victories become an ordinary, accessible part of daily life, the nation’s high-tech digital future will continue to leave its women behind.
(Musheera Ashraf is a Laadli Media Fellow. The opinions and views expressed in this report are those of the author. Laadli and UNFPA do not necessarily endorse the views.)