By Musheera Ashraf
Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh: India’s digital narrative is frequently told through soaring national metrics. Every single minute, millions of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions zip through cyberspace, anchoring a national identity built around seamless online services, digital public infrastructure, and government welfare schemes wired directly to mobile apps. This is the face of a modern, fast-tracking superpower. Yet, far away from this glittering vision—in rural settlements where smartphones are shared family commodities, passwords are guessed, and technical jargon remains deeply intimidating—women continue to stand at the margins of a digital revolution that has shifted far faster than they could ever hope to follow.
The human cost of this accelerated transition is visible in villages just a few kilometers outside urban centers like Saharanpur in western Uttar Pradesh. Here, thirty-five-year-old Musayyada, a widow trying to raise her family against the odds, begins her day long before the city wakes. To secure her livelihood and basic entitlements, she must board a crowded, bumpy tempo at the break of dawn, traveling to the local gas agency simply to ask why her cooking gas cylinder subsidy has failed to materialize for three consecutive months.
By the time she arrives after the arduous journey, a weary queue has already formed outside the agency gate. When her turn finally arrives, staff members dismiss her grievance with a bureaucratic wall: she will only receive her pending subsidy if she purchases a new gas pipe, which they insist is mandatory. Musayyada blinks in disbelief, caught off guard by the unexpected expense.
"I changed the pipe just a month ago. I do not need it," she tells them, trying to reason with the personnel.
The reply she receives is flat, mechanical, and rehearsed. "It is mandatory. Even if you do not need it now, you can use it later."
The price of the redundant pipe is two hundred rupees—roughly equivalent to the cost of an entire day’s meals for her family of four. For someone living on the absolute economic precipice, a forced, unnecessary purchase of two hundred rupees represents a severe structural blow, engineered entirely through bureaucratic gatekeeping tied to digital and administrative compliance.
Musayyada carries a second-hand mobile phone that she managed to purchase for twenty-five hundred rupees, a steep sum that she cleared through painful, hard-earned 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 in an era where basic survival requires digital tethering.
Yet, her command over the device is severely restricted. She uses the phone exclusively to receive incoming calls and to dial her daughter, who lives in another village. For everything else—including fundamental tasks like booking her LPG gas cylinder—she is forced to rely on the 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, revealing a familiar coping mechanism born of necessity: "Akhir me do zero hain." (There are two zeroes at the end).
Across 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, handle everything from booking cooking gas to checking whether government welfare subsidies have cleared. While trust helps bridge the vast chasm left by systemic digital illiteracy, it is a fragile bridge that exposes women to profound vulnerabilities.
In another household in the region, an elderly woman found herself constantly harassed by strange phone calls because a relative had casually used her mobile number to register multiple unvetted online accounts without her knowledge or consent. "I had no idea why people were calling me by someone else’s name," recalls sixty-two-year-old Savitri. These are seemingly minor anecdotes in the grand, sweeping narrative of India’s national digital inclusion drive, but they underscore how effortlessly the boundary between institutional trust and personal vulnerability blurs for those who lack independent control over technology.
A decade into the overarching Digital India mission, a persistent gendered digital divide continues to dictate who gets to fully participate in the modern economy and who must remain standing outside the digital door. Data indicates that nearly forty percent fewer rural women own smartphones compared to men. Furthermore, among the subset of women who do manage to own a handset, a significant proportion exercise little to no actual control over its usage, contents, or security parameters.
This technological chasm becomes even more pronounced when examining digital finance. Men are significantly more likely to perform UPI transactions than women, with estimates reflecting a substantial percentage gap. Official national UPI statistics frequently fail to capture this glaring disparity because transaction data is rarely disaggregated by gender. However, industry insiders working directly within the digital payments ecosystem readily acknowledge the underlying imbalance.
In 2023, a senior Google Pay official publicly stated that women accounted for 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. These already low national figures plunge even further when shifting focus strictly to semi-urban and deeply rural hinterlands.
Fear acts as an unseen yet remarkably powerful barrier keeping women offline. A fifty-year-old schoolteacher residing in Saharanpur proudly owns a smartphone equipped with a popular UPI financial application, yet she adamantly refuses to use it. "What if the money goes to the wrong person? Who will return it to me?" she asks, voicing a paralyzing anxiety about digital error. Instead, she routinely hands her device over to her son whenever she needs to execute a digital payment. "If something goes wrong, I will be blamed. Better not to try."
Many rural women articulate similar preferences for physical cash, driven not by a lack of general awareness, but by an acute absence of institutional confidence. They have grown up hearing cautionary tales of financial fraud, stolen passwords, accidental payment reversals, and phones getting permanently blocked after too many failed security attempts. For women with zero margin for financial error, digital mistakes feel infinitely heavier and more consequential than physical ones.
Sita, a thirty-year-old newly married woman, summarizes this pervasive dynamic with stark simplicity. She has never booked her own LPG cylinder. "My husband does it. I do not have a phone," she notes matter-of-factly. When she does use a device, it is her husband’s phone, utilized strictly to watch entertainment videos on YouTube. "If something goes wrong, I will have to hear from everyone," she adds, pointing to the social policing that accompanies any misstep by a woman in a shared digital space.
This profound fear of making a mistake is far from irrational or imagined. It is forged through years of conditioning—of being systematically told to be careful, of being disproportionately blamed for household errors, and of being given virtually no safe room to experiment, fail, and learn. Meanwhile, state and corporate digital services continue to expand aggressively. Welfare schemes are constantly linked to mobile applications, subsidies require periodic online updates, SIM cards demand biometric revalidation, and banks aggressively push customers toward mandatory Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance. Each newly added technological layer demands a level of digital self-assurance that many rural women have simply never been permitted to build.
Online content creators capture adjacent layers of this stubborn reality from a different vantage point. Recently, an Instagram creator operating under the handle @lifeofpuja addressed this persistent societal glass ceiling in a video, noting that no matter how hard she works or how many followers she earns, she is still universally recognized primarily as someone’s wife or daughter-in-law. Rural women echo this exact sentiment in quieter, more localized ways. They routinely receive zero institutional recognition for learning new digital skills, and their primary social identity remains firmly anchored to the household rather than their personal technological competencies.
Civil society organizations working on the ground emphasize that the crisis is not merely about basic literacy, but about structural dependence. According to representatives from Sarvothanam, a Delhi-based organization dedicated to online safety and grassroots digital training, women who lack independent mastery over their devices are structurally forced to rely on others. "Women who do not know how to use their phones rely on others. But the same people can misuse their access. Personal photos, messages, even their OTPs are shared without them knowing what is happening," a member of the organization explains, highlighting the severe safety implications of forced technological dependency.
Despite these formidable structural hurdles, pockets of grassroots transformation are slowly unfolding across the region. In a village situated near Deoband, Rahima, who holds the distinction of being the first college graduate in her family, actively attempts to bridge the knowledge gap by teaching basic digital tasks to her mother and neighboring women. "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 driven entirely by communal care rather than institutional bureaucracy.
Parveen, a social worker operating among rural communities in Saharanpur, western Uttar Pradesh, argues that the path forward demands intensive handholding, continuous community-level training, and the establishment of dedicated women-led digital learning circles. "Digital empowerment is not only about giving a device. It is about making women feel safe, confident, and in control," observes a digital rights volunteer active in the same region.
India’s broader digital journey continues to race ahead at a breakneck pace, yet a substantial segment of its population is still forced to walk cautiously behind it. The women inhabiting these villages are not engaged in an ideological resistance against technology; rather, they are desperately trying to navigate a socioeconomic world that moved forward at a velocity far exceeding their access, their confidence, and their institutional trust.
For them, true autonomy is not measured in apps successfully installed or financial transactions seamlessly completed. Instead, it is measured in quiet, personal victories: answering an incoming text message without assistance, checking a cooking gas subsidy status independently for the first time, or daring to press a digital button without the crushing fear of reprisal. Until these minor milestones become ordinary, everyday realities, India’s digital future will continue to leave its women behind on the margins.