By Musheera Ashraf
Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh: India’s contemporary narrative is frequently told through soaring technological metrics. Government portals, mobile governance apps, and millions of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions conducted every single minute paint a picture of a nation charging headfirst into a seamless digital future. Yet, far removed from this glossy metropolitan vision, in dusty villages where mobile devices are shared among household members and critical account passwords remain guessed at best, women continue to stand at the profound margins of a digital revolution that has shifted faster than they could ever hope to follow.
This stark reality is visible on any given morning in villages roughly ten kilometres from Saharanpur in western Uttar Pradesh. For thirty-five-year-old Musheera, a widow struggling to manage her household, the day begins long before the urban centers wake up. She boards a crowded local tempo at dawn to visit the nearest gas agency, determined to find out why her government-backed cooking gas subsidy has failed to reflect in her account for the past three consecutive months. By the time she arrives after a bumpy ride, a long, weary queue has already formed outside the distribution gate.
When her turn finally arrives, agency staff inform her curtly that her subsidy will only be released if she purchases a new gas pipe, which they insist is mandatory. Musheera blinks in disbelief, caught off guard by the unexpected financial demand. She tries to explain the reality of her household economics.
"I changed the pipe just a month ago. I do not need it," she tells them.
The reply from behind the counter is flat, rehearsed, and leaves no room for negotiation. "It is mandatory. Even if you do not need it now, you can use it later."
The replacement pipe costs her two hundred rupees—roughly equivalent to the cost of a full day’s meals for her family of four. For someone living on the absolute precipice of financial security, an arbitrary administrative mandate strips away vital sustenance.
Musheera carries a second-hand mobile phone that she purchased for twenty-five hundred rupees, a steep sum she managed to pay off in painful installments.
"A phone is necessary now. Even if we skip a meal, we have to keep a phone," she explains.
Yet, her command over the device is severely limited. She can receive incoming calls and dial her daughter, who lives in another village. For nearly every other digital requirement, she is forced to rely on the local shopkeeper next door—even for the routine booking of her LPG cylinder. When asked how she manages to remember her daughter’s phone number without being able to read or write, she laughs shyly.
"Akhir me do zero hain," she says, pointing out that there are two zeroes at the end.
Across vast stretches of rural India, women remain heavily dependent on neighbours, local shopkeepers, and male family members to execute the most basic digital tasks. These hands, almost exclusively male, handle everything from booking LPG cylinders to verifying subsidy disbursements and checking bank balances. Trust inevitably fills the wide chasm left by systemic digital illiteracy, but that trust carries profound and often invisible risks.
In another household in the region, an elderly woman found herself bewildered by a barrage of strange phone calls from unknown men. It later emerged that a male relative had casually used her phone number to register multiple 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.
Incidents of this nature may appear minor when viewed against the sprawling backdrop of India’s massive national digital push, but they illustrate with brutal clarity how easily the boundary between misplaced trust and severe personal vulnerability blurs for women who lack autonomy over their own digital footprint.
A decade into the heavily promoted Digital India mission, a persistent gendered digital divide continues to dictate precisely who gets to participate in modern economic life and who must stand outside the digital door. Data indicates that nearly forty per cent fewer rural women own smartphones compared to men. Furthermore, among the women who do manage to own devices, a significant portion exercises little to no independent control over how those phones are used or accessed.
This divide becomes even sharper when examining digital financial inclusion. Men outpace women in performing UPI transactions by a substantial gap of 13.7 percentage points. Official national UPI statistics frequently obscure this underlying disparity because transaction volumes are rarely broken down by gender. However, industry insiders working directly within the payment ecosystem readily acknowledge the stark imbalance. In 2023, a senior Google Pay official noted publicly that women constituted less than thirty percent of total UPI users. A year later, a representative from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) echoed a remarkably similar estimate. These figures shrink even further when isolating semi-urban and deeply rural geographies.
The hesitation to embrace digital finance is rooted in tangible anxieties. A fifty-year-old schoolteacher in Saharanpur proudly possesses a UPI application loaded onto 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 widespread dread. She routinely hands her device over to her son whenever she needs to make a digital payment. "If something goes wrong, I will be blamed. Better not to try."
Fear operates as an unseen but extraordinarily powerful barrier in these communities. Many rural women explain that their preference for physical cash is not born out of a lack of environmental awareness, but rather from a profound lack of institutional confidence. They have repeatedly heard cautionary tales of financial fraud, stolen passwords, accidental payment reversals, and phones getting permanently blocked after too many failed verification attempts. For women with limited safety nets, digital mistakes carry a psychological and financial weight far heavier than physical ones.
Thirty-year-old Sita, a newly married woman living in the region, sums up the dynamic with blunt simplicity. She has never booked her own LPG cylinder.
"My husband does it. I do not have a phone," she says simply.
She is occasionally allowed to use her husband’s device, but strictly to watch entertainment videos on YouTube. "If something goes wrong, I will have to hear from everyone," she adds, highlighting the constant scrutiny women face when interacting with technology.
This persistent fear of making a mistake is not an irrational imagination. It is shaped by lifetimes of being conditioned to exercise extreme caution, of being disproportionately blamed for household errors, and of having virtually zero room to experiment or fail safely. Meanwhile, public and private digital services continue to expand at a relentless pace. Welfare schemes are inextricably linked to dedicated mobile applications, government subsidies require periodic digital updates, SIM cards demand biometric revalidation, banks insist on rigorous Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols, and gas agencies push customers toward online portals. Each newly added technological layer demands a level of self-assurance and technical literacy that many rural women have never been permitted or enabled to build.
Online content creators frequently capture adjacent layers of this broader societal 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 routinely receive zero institutional recognition for learning new skills, and their primary social identity remains firmly anchored to the household rather than their independent capabilities.
According to Sarvothanam, a Delhi-based organization that focuses extensively on online safety and digital literacy training, the core crisis is not merely a lack of basic literacy, but an entrenched structural dependence.
"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," an organization representative explains.
Despite the profound systemic challenges, pockets of organic change are slowly unfolding on the ground. In a village situated near Deoband, Rahima, who proudly stands as the first university graduate in her family, spends her time attempting to teach 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," Rahima says. "It is slow work, but it is work driven by care, not fear."
Parveen, a social worker who actively engages with rural women across Saharanpur in western Uttar Pradesh, emphasizes that the path forward demands intensive handholding, localized community training sessions, and 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," notes a digital rights volunteer active in the same region.
India’s overarching digital journey is racing ahead into the future, but a significant portion of its population is still forced to walk carefully and anxiously behind it. The women residing in these rural villages are not engaged in an ideological resistance against modern technology; rather, they are desperately trying to navigate an unforgiving world that moved forward at a pace far exceeding their access, their confidence, and their trust.
For them, true autonomy is not measured by the number of mobile applications installed or financial transactions successfully completed. Instead, it is measured in quiet, hard-won victories: answering an incoming message independently without outside help, checking a subsidy status online for the very first time, or daring to press a digital button without the crushing fear of reprisal. And until these modest victories become an ordinary, unremarkable part of daily life, the nation’s digital future will continue to leave its women behind.
(Musheera Ashraf is a Laadli Media Fellow. The opinions and views expressed are those of the author. Laadli and UNFPA do not necessarily endorse the views.)