By Musheera Ashraf
Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh: India’s digital transformation is frequently celebrated through grand numerical milestones. Billions of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions course through the national network every single month. Government welfare schemes are seamlessly integrated into mobile applications, and online public services promise transparency and ease for citizens across the country. Yet, far removed from this high-speed vision of a cashless and paperless economy, millions of women in rural interiors continue to navigate a reality of shared handsets, guessed passwords, and systemic exclusion. Living in villages where technology has advanced faster than their access, confidence, or digital literacy, these women find themselves standing persistently at the margins of a digital world that left them behind.
The daily struggle of this technological disconnect is evident in the routine of Musayyada, a thirty-five-year-old widow residing in a village roughly ten kilometers from Saharanpur in western Uttar Pradesh. Her day begins long before the urban centers awaken. At dawn, she boards a crowded, rattling local tempo to visit the nearest liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) agency. Her mission is simple yet exhausting: to inquire why her cooking gas subsidy has failed to credit to her account for three consecutive months. By the time she arrives at the agency office, a long queue has already formed outside the gates, mirroring the persistent bureaucratic hurdles that rural citizens routinely face.
When her turn finally arrives, agency staff inform her that the pending subsidy will only be released if she purchases a new gas pipe, which they assert is strictly mandatory. Musayyada blinks in sheer disbelief, her monthly livelihood hanging in the balance. She protests that she replaced her current connection pipe barely a month ago and has no functional need for another. The response from the staff is flat, rehearsed, and devoid of empathy. They tell her that the purchase is mandatory policy and that even if she does not require it immediately, she can keep it as a backup for the future.
The mandatory pipe costs her two hundred rupees—an amount that roughly equals the cost of an entire day’s meals for her family of four. For a household surviving on meager daily wages, an arbitrary expenditure forced by administrative gatekeeping is a severe blow.
Musayyada carries a second-hand mobile phone that she purchased for twenty-five hundred rupees, a sum she managed to pay off through hard-earned installments. Reflecting on the economic strain, she notes that owning a phone has become an absolute necessity of modern survival, even if it forces her family to skip meals. However, her command over the device is severely restricted. She uses the basic handset primarily to receive incoming calls and to dial her married daughter who lives in a distant village. For virtually every digital task, from booking her monthly LPG cylinder to checking subsidy status, she is forced to rely on the local shopkeeper next door. When asked how she manages to remember her daughter’s phone number without being able to read or write, she laughs shyly and offers a simple mnemonic: there are two zeroes at the end.
Across the vast expanse of rural India, women routinely depend on neighbors, local shopkeepers, and male family members to execute the most basic digital tasks. These helping hands—predominantly male—manage everything from booking essential cooking fuel to verifying welfare disbursements. While trust frequently fills the gaping void left by the lack of structured digital literacy programs, this reliance introduces profound vulnerabilities and risks.
In another household in the region, an elderly woman found herself incessantly disturbed by calls from complete strangers because a male relative had used her personal mobile number to register multiple unverified online accounts. Sixty-two-year-old Savitri recalls the confusion and distress caused by the oversight, noting that she had no idea why unfamiliar callers were addressing her by someone else’s name. While such occurrences might seem like minor anecdotes within the broader narrative of India’s monumental digital push, they starkly illustrate how easily the boundary between community trust and digital vulnerability blurs for those unequipped to manage their own digital footprints.
Ten years into the ambitious nationwide push of the Digital India mission, a persistent gendered digital divide continues to dictate the terms of modern participation, determining explicitly who gets to engage with the formal economy 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. Furthermore, among the subset of women who do manage to own devices, a significant proportion exercise little to no independent control over how those phones are used, monitored, or maintained.
This divide becomes even sharper when examining digital finance and mobile-based payments. Men outpace women in performing UPI transactions by a notable gap of 13.7 percentage points. Official national UPI statistics rarely reflect these granular demographic disparities because transaction volumes are not routinely disaggregated by gender. However, industry insiders and professionals working within the digital payments ecosystem readily acknowledge the underlying imbalance. In 2023, a senior executive with Google Pay publicly estimated that women accounted for less than thirty percent of active UPI users. A representative from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) shared a similarly conservative estimate the following year. In semi-urban and deeply rural pockets, these adoption numbers drop even further.
The hesitation to embrace digital finance is compounded by acute anxiety over potential financial loss and social censure. 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. Expressing her underlying fears, she questions what would happen if funds were mistakenly transferred to an incorrect recipient and whether anyone would return the money. Consequently, she hands her phone over to her son whenever she needs to execute a digital payment. She explains that if anything goes wrong during a transaction, she will inevitably bear the blame, leading her to conclude that it is safer not to try at all.
Fear functions as an unseen yet immensely powerful barrier across rural communities. Many rural women articulate a clear preference for physical cash, driven not by a lack of awareness regarding modern technology, but by a profound absence of confidence born from systemic exclusion. They recount harrowing stories circulating through their villages—tales of financial fraud, stolen passwords, reversed transactions blocked abruptly after too many failed verification attempts, and accounts frozen without warning. For women living on the economic precipice, a single digital mistake carries consequences far heavier than physical missteps.
Sita, a thirty-year-old newly married woman, summarizes this sentiment with striking simplicity. She has never booked her own cooking gas cylinder because her husband manages the task, and she does not possess a personal mobile phone of her own. She occasionally uses her husband’s device to watch videos on YouTube, but nothing more. She notes that if she were to attempt an independent transaction and something went wrong, she would have to face criticism from everyone in the household.
This acute fear of making mistakes is far from imaginary. It is carefully shaped by years of conditioning, where women are repeatedly told to exercise extreme caution, blamed for household errors, and afforded very little room to experiment or learn through trial and error. Meanwhile, government and corporate digital services continue to expand at a relentless pace. Welfare schemes are perpetually linked to mobile applications, subsidy disbursements require periodic digital updates, SIM cards demand biometric revalidation, and banking institutions insist on rigorous Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance. Each newly added bureaucratic and technological layer demands a level of digital self-assurance and literacy that many rural women have never been permitted or supported to build.
Online content creators frequently capture parallel layers of this systemic reality within digital spaces. Recently, an Instagram creator operating under the handle @lifeofpuja highlighted in a widely viewed video that despite her professional labor and follower count, she remains identified primarily through her domestic relationships as someone’s wife or daughter-in-law. Rural women echo this exact sentiment in quieter, localized ways, frequently receiving little to no societal recognition for acquiring new technological skills, as their primary identity remains inextricably tied to the domestic sphere rather than their individual capabilities.
Organizations working on the ground emphasize that the core crisis is rooted in dependence rather than mere technological illiteracy. Representatives from Sarvothanam, a Delhi-based organization specializing in online safety and digital literacy training, note that women who do not understand the mechanics of their smartphones are forced to outsource basic digital tasks to others. This dependency creates fertile ground for exploitation, as personal photographs, private messages, and sensitive One-Time Passwords (OTPs) are frequently shared or accessed without the women fully comprehending the implications of these actions.
Despite these formidable structural hurdles, pockets of grassroots change are slowly emerging across the region. In a village situated near Deoband, Rahima, who holds the distinction of being the first college graduate in her family, dedicates her time to teaching basic digital skills to her mother and other women in her neighborhood. She patiently demonstrates how to open incoming text messages, locate saved contacts within the phone directory, and identify suspicious links designed to defraud unsuspecting users. While this educational work is undeniably slow, it is driven by genuine community care rather than institutional mandates or fear.
Social workers operating in western Uttar Pradesh emphasize that charting a viable path forward requires sustained intervention, intensive community training initiatives, and dedicated women-led digital learning circles. Parveen, a Saharanpur-based social worker, notes that true digital empowerment extends far beyond simply distributing hardware devices to rural households. A digital rights volunteer active in the region similarly stresses that empowerment requires cultivating an environment where women feel fundamentally safe, self-assured, and in control of their digital interactions.
As India’s national digital journey races aggressively ahead into the future, a significant segment of the population continues to walk cautiously behind. The women inhabiting these rural villages are not engaged in active resistance against technology itself; rather, they are struggling to navigate an ecosystem that accelerated far beyond their current levels of access, confidence, and institutional trust.
For these women, true autonomy is not measured by the number of mobile applications installed on a device or the volume of electronic transactions successfully executed. Instead, it is measured in quiet, hard-won victories: answering an incoming text message without asking for assistance, checking a welfare subsidy status independently for the very first time, or daring to press a digital button without the paralyzing fear of failure. Until these modest milestones become ordinary realities for everyone, the nation’s high-speed digital future will continue to leave its women behind.