Musheera Ashraf, Twocircles.net
Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh: India’s digital story is frequently told through staggering metrics of scale. Observers point to the millions of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions recorded every single minute, the seamless rollout of online public utility services, and the extensive integration of government welfare schemes with mobile applications. Yet, far away from this gleaming vision of a hyper-connected nation, a starkly different reality persists. In villages where smartphones are communal assets shared among family members and online passwords are often guessed rather than secured, women continue to stand at the margins of an economic and technological world that has shifted far faster than they could ever hope to follow.
The human cost of this rapid technological transition is evident in the daily struggles of women like Musayyada. A thirty-five-year-old widow residing in a village roughly ten kilometers from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, Musayyada begins her day long before the urban centers wake up. She boards a crowded local tempo at the break of dawn to visit the local gas agency. Her mission is simple yet frustrating: she needs to find out why her cooking gas cylinder subsidy has failed to reflect in her account for three consecutive months. By the time she finally arrives at the agency, a long queue has already formed outside the locked gates, composed of other locals facing similar bureaucratic hurdles.
When her turn eventually arrives, the staff at the agency dismiss her grievance with a bureaucratic wall. They inform her that her subsidy will only be released if she purchases a new gas pipe, which they insist is entirely mandatory. Musayyada blinks in disbelief, caught off guard by an arbitrary condition she never anticipated. She tries to explain her situation to the attendants, pointing out that she had replaced her equipment only a month prior and has no actual need for a new part. The reply she receives is flat, mechanical, and rehearsed. The staff member tells her that the rule is mandatory and that even if she does not need the pipe right now, she can simply store it to use later.
For Musayyada, the financial impact of this arbitrary demand is severe. The gas pipe costs her two hundred rupees—an amount that roughly equates to the total cost of a day’s meals for her family of four. It is a steep price to pay for a bureaucratic requirement she neither understands nor requires, cutting directly into her household’s meager sustenance.
Her relationship with technology mirrors this vulnerability. Musayyada carries a second-hand mobile phone that she managed to purchase for twenty-five hundred rupees, a sum she paid off through difficult installments over time. Reflecting on the necessity of the device, she notes that a phone has become an inescapable requirement of modern life. Even if her household has to skip a meal, she feels compelled to maintain a functioning mobile device. However, her practical utility of the phone remains severely restricted. She can only use it to receive incoming calls and to dial her daughter, who lives in a different village. For virtually every other digital task, she is forced to rely on the shopkeeper next door—even for the basic task of booking her LPG cylinder. When asked how she manages to remember her daughter’s phone number without knowing how to read or write, she breaks into a shy laugh, explaining that the sequence is anchored in her memory simply because there are two zeroes at the very end.
Across rural India, this scenario repeats itself with striking regularity. Women routinely depend on neighbors, local shopkeepers, and male family members to execute the most basic digital tasks. These external hands, which are overwhelmingly male, manage everything from booking cooking gas cylinders to checking the status of government financial subsidies. Trust effectively fills the massive void left by a lack of digital literacy, but this reliance introduces profound risks to personal autonomy and security.
In another household in the region, an elderly woman found herself perpetually harassed by calls from complete strangers. It eventually emerged that a relative had used her personal phone number to register multiple online commercial and social accounts without her knowledge or consent. Sixty-two-year-old Savitri recalls the confusion and distress caused by the incident, noting that she had no idea why strange people were suddenly calling her by someone else’s name. While such occurrences might seem like minor incidents when viewed against the grand narrative of India’s sweeping digital push, they vividly illustrate how easily the boundary between misplaced trust and severe vulnerability blurs for those left behind.
Ten years into the ambitious nationwide push of the Digital India mission, a persistent and pervasive gendered digital divide continues to dictate the terms of participation. It establishes clear boundaries regarding who gets to actively participate in the modern economy and who must remain standing outside the locked door. Statistical indicators reveal that nearly forty percent fewer rural women own smartphones compared to their male counterparts. Furthermore, among the subset of women who do manage to own phones, a significant proportion exercise little to no control over how those devices are used or what content they access.
This structural divide becomes even sharper when examining the landscape of digital finance and mobile payments. Men are statistically more likely to perform UPI transactions, with the gender gap stretching to 13.7 percentage points. Official national statistics for UPI transactions frequently obscure this disparity because the underlying data is rarely broken down by gender. However, individuals actively working within the digital payments ecosystem readily acknowledge the underlying imbalance. In 2023, a senior executive at Google Pay publicly noted that women accounted for less than thirty percent of total UPI users. In the following year, a representative from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) cited a strikingly similar estimate. These already low numbers experience a dramatic drop when the focus shifts specifically to semi-urban and rural areas.
The psychological barriers underpinning these statistics are powerful. A fifty-year-old schoolteacher residing in Saharanpur possesses a fully functioning UPI application installed on her smartphone, yet she steadfastly refuses to use it for any transactions. Her hesitation is rooted in a deep-seated anxiety about making irreversible mistakes. She asks rhetorically what would happen if her money accidentally went to the wrong person, wondering who would ever step forward to return it to her. Consequently, whenever she needs to make a payment, she routinely hands her phone over to her son. She explains that if something were to go wrong under her own watch, she would inevitably bear the blame, leading her to conclude that it is simply better not to try at all.
Fear functions as an unseen but formidable barrier across the countryside. Many rural women express a strong preference for traditional physical cash not because they lack general awareness of how the world works, but because they lack the institutional confidence required to navigate digital errors. They have heard countless cautionary tales of financial fraud, stolen passwords, reversed transactions, and phones being permanently blocked after too many failed security attempts. For these women, making a digital mistake carries a psychological weight that feels significantly heavier and more consequential than making a physical one.
Sita, a thirty-year-old newly married woman, summarizes the dynamic with stark simplicity. She has never booked her own LPG gas cylinder because her husband handles the task, noting matter-of-factly that she does not even possess a personal phone. When she occasionally uses her husband’s device, her usage is restricted to watching videos on YouTube. She adds that if anything were to go wrong with the device while it is in her hands, she would immediately have to face criticism from everyone in the household.
This acute fear of committing an error is far from imagined; it is shaped by years of conditioning. It is reinforced by a steady drumbeat of warnings to be careful, a cultural tendency to blame women exclusively for administrative or technical errors, and a general lack of a safe environment with adequate room to experiment and learn. Meanwhile, digital governance services continue to expand at a relentless pace. Welfare schemes are increasingly linked to proprietary apps, subsidies require constant online updates, SIM cards demand periodic revalidation, and banks rigidly insist on Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance. Each newly added digital layer demands a baseline of confidence that many rural women have simply never been permitted or enabled to build.
Online content creators frequently capture adjacent layers of this complex socio-cultural reality. In a recent video shared on Instagram, a creator operating under the handle @lifeofpuja remarked that regardless of how hard she works or how many digital followers she manages to earn, she is still fundamentally recognized in society primarily as someone’s wife or daughter-in-law. Rural women echo this sentiment in quieter, more subdued ways. They routinely fail to receive any formal recognition or social validation for acquiring new technical skills. Their core identity remains rigidly tied to the domestic sphere of the household rather than being acknowledged for their growing competence in digital spaces.
Organizations attempting to address these grassroots challenges point out that the core issue extends far beyond basic literacy to encompass systemic dependence. Representatives from Sarvothanam, a Delhi-based organization dedicated to promoting online safety and digital training initiatives, emphasize that women who do not fully understand how to operate their smartphones are forced to rely entirely on external assistance. However, that very same access leaves them exposed to potential misuse by the individuals helping them. Personal photographs, private messages, and even one-time passwords (OTPs) are frequently shared or accessed without the women fully comprehending the implications of what is happening around them.
Despite the multiplicity of these challenges, glimmers of grassroots change are slowly beginning to unfold. In a village situated near Deoband, a young woman named Rahima—who holds the distinction of being the first college graduate in her family—spends her time attempting to impart basic digital literacy to her mother and other women living in her immediate neighborhood. She instructs them on foundational tasks such as opening incoming SMS messages, locating saved contacts in their phonebooks, and identifying suspicious or fraudulent digital links. It is admittedly slow and painstaking work, but it is an effort driven fundamentally by care and community support rather than intimidation or fear.
Parveen, a social worker who actively collaborates with rural women across Saharanpur in western Uttar Pradesh, argues that the path forward requires a sustained commitment to intensive handholding, community-led training programs, and dedicated women-centric digital learning groups. Digital empowerment, according to digital rights volunteers operating in the region, is not merely about distributing hardware devices to citizens. True empowerment requires ensuring that women feel fundamentally safe, deeply confident, and entirely in control of the technology they hold.
India’s broader digital journey continues to race forward at an unprecedented pace, yet a substantial segment of the population is still walking cautiously behind it. The women residing in these rural villages are not actively resisting technological advancement; rather, they are desperately trying to navigate an artificial ecosystem that has moved forward far faster than their access, their confidence, and their institutional trust.
For these women, true autonomy cannot be accurately measured by the number of mobile applications installed on a screen or the volume of completed digital transactions. Instead, it is measured in small, quiet victories: answering a text message without asking for outside help, successfully checking a subsidy status on their own for the very first time, or daring to press a digital button without the paralyzing fear of failure. Until these modest victories become an ordinary part of daily life, the nation’s digital future will continue to leave its women behind on the margins.
(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 expressed herein.)