By Musheera Ashraf
Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh: India’s contemporary narrative is routinely told through soaring technological metrics. Government communications and economic reports emphasize millions of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions executed every minute, the widespread digitization of citizen services, and the seamless integration of welfare schemes into mobile applications. Yet, far away from this gleaming vision of a cashless, hyper-connected society, a very different reality persists in rural pockets. In villages where smartphones are frequently shared commodities and digital passwords are guessed or handled by intermediaries, women continue to stand at the margins of a technological transition that has accelerated far faster than they could possibly follow.
This divergence is starkly visible just ten kilometers outside Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Here, thirty-five-year-old Musheera, a widow, begins her day long before the city wakes. She boards a crowded tempo at dawn, traveling to the local gas agency to inquire why her cooking gas cylinder subsidy has failed to credit to her account for three consecutive months. By the time she arrives, a long queue has already formed outside the agency gates, reflecting the administrative hurdles ordinary citizens routinely face when dealing with automated state systems.
When Musheera finally reaches the front of the line, agency staff inform her that her grievance can only be addressed—and her subsidy released—if she purchases a new gas pipe, which they insist is mandatory. Visibly confused, Musheera blinks in disbelief. She protests that she replaced the exact same component just a month prior and has no functional need for another. The staff’s response is flat, rehearsed, and absolute: it is mandatory, they claim, and even if she does not require it immediately, she can keep it for future use. The cost of the unnecessary pipe is two hundred rupees—roughly equivalent to a day’s worth of meals for her family of four. For a household operating on the economic razor’s edge, such arbitrary bureaucratic expenditures represent a severe and painful burden.
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. Explaining the necessity of the device, she notes that owning a phone has become non-negotiable in modern society, stating that even if her family has to skip a meal, maintaining a mobile connection is imperative. However, her practical command of the device is severely restricted. She uses it almost exclusively to receive incoming calls and to dial her daughter, who lives in a neighboring village. For virtually every other digital requirement, she must rely on the shopkeeper next door—even for the routine booking of her liquefied petroleum gas cylinder. When asked how she manages to remember her daughter’s phone number despite not being able to read or write, she smiles shyly and explains that she relies on a simple memory anchor: the number ends with two zeroes.
Across rural India, women routinely depend on neighbors, local shopkeepers, and male family members to navigate the most basic digital tasks. These external hands perform essential functions ranging from booking cooking gas to checking welfare subsidy statuses. While trust often fills the widening vacuum left by a lack of formal digital literacy, this reliance carries profound vulnerabilities.
In another household within the region, an elderly woman found herself perpetually disturbed by phone calls from strangers because a relative had inadvertently used her primary phone number to register multiple unvetted online accounts. Sixty-two-year-old Savitri recalls her confusion, noting that she had no idea why unfamiliar callers were addressing her by someone else’s name. While such occurrences might appear minor against the grand backdrop of India’s national digital inclusion initiatives, they powerfully illustrate how swiftly the boundary between interpersonal trust and severe personal vulnerability can blur for digitally disenfranchised citizens.
A decade into the overarching Digital India mission, a persistent gendered digital divide continues to dictate the terms of civic participation, sorting the population into those who actively wield technology and those who must stand outside the door. Statistical assessments indicate that nearly forty percent fewer rural women own smartphones compared to their male counterparts. Among the subset of women who do manage to secure ownership of a device, a significant majority exercise little to no independent control over its usage, applications, or data.
This structural divide becomes even sharper within the sphere of digital finance. Men in rural and semi-urban settings are substantially more likely to perform digital transactions via UPI, with data pointing to a considerable percentage gap between genders. Official macro-level UPI statistics routinely obscure these disparities because transaction volumes are not disaggregated by gender. Nevertheless, professionals operating within the digital payments ecosystem openly acknowledge the imbalance. In 2023, a senior executive at Google Pay publicly estimated that women constituted less than thirty percent of active UPI users. A representative of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) shared a similarly conservative estimate the following year, with participation rates dropping even lower when isolating semi-urban and rural demographics.
The hesitation to embrace digital financial tools is rooted in deep-seated anxieties. A fifty-year-old schoolteacher residing in Saharanpur possesses a UPI application installed on her smartphone, yet she steadfastly refuses to use it. Expressing a common fear, she asks what would happen if money were mistakenly transferred to an incorrect account and who would be responsible for recovering it. Consequently, she hands her phone over to her son whenever she needs to execute a payment, noting that if an error occurs, she would bear the blame, making it safer not to try at all.
For many rural women, apprehension functions as an unseen but formidable barrier. Their preference for physical cash is rarely born of mere ignorance; rather, it stems from a stark lack of confidence compounded by pervasive stories of financial fraud, stolen passwords, reversed transactions, and locked accounts resulting from failed authentication attempts. Within their economic reality, digital mistakes carry heavier consequences than physical ones.
Sita, a thirty-year-old newly married woman, summarizes the dynamic succinctly. Having never booked an LPG cylinder herself, she explains that her husband handles the task because she does not possess her own phone. She occasionally borrows his device to watch videos on YouTube, but avoids financial applications entirely, noting that any mistake on her part would subject her to widespread reprimand from family members.
This pervasive fear of making errors is not an unfounded imagination. It is shaped by years of socialization that emphasizes caution, assigns blame for household errors, and provides minimal space for trial-and-error experimentation. Meanwhile, the digital architecture of the state and private sectors continues to expand unabated. Government welfare schemes are increasingly tied to mobile applications, subsidy disbursements require continuous digital authentication, SIM cards demand periodic revalidation, banks insist on rigorous digital Know Your Customer compliance, and fuel agencies direct customers to check their statuses online. Each successive administrative layer demands a baseline of technological confidence that many rural women have never been permitted or enabled to build.
Online content creators capture adjacent dimensions of this socio-digital reality. Recently, an Instagram creator operating under the handle @lifeofpuja observed in a widely shared video that regardless of her professional output or follower count, she remains socially identified primarily through her relational status as someone’s wife or daughter-in-law. Rural women echo this sentiment through quieter lived experiences, frequently receiving little institutional or social recognition for acquiring new technical competencies, while their fundamental identities remain anchored to domestic roles rather than their digital capabilities.
According to Sarvothanam, a Delhi-based civil society organization specializing in online safety and digital literacy training, the core crisis extends beyond mere literacy into structural dependence. A representative of the organization explains that women who lack the technical proficiency to independently operate their mobile phones are forced to rely on external agents. Unfortunately, this dependence creates avenues for the misuse of access, noting instances where personal photographs, private messages, and sensitive One-Time Passwords are compromised or shared without the victims fully comprehending the processes unfolding around them.
Despite these formidable structural hurdles, pockets of grassroots transformation are beginning to emerge. 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 foundational digital skills to her mother and other women in her neighborhood. She instructs them on basic tasks such as opening incoming SMS messages, locating saved contacts, and identifying suspicious digital links. While progress is incremental, her initiative is propelled by a spirit of community care rather than fear.
Parveen, a social worker engaged with rural communities across western Uttar Pradesh, emphasizes that the path forward demands intensive handholding, structured community-level training programs, and the establishment of women-led digital learning circles. Echoing this perspective, a digital rights volunteer active in the region asserts that true digital empowerment transcends the mere distribution of hardware devices; it requires cultivating an environment where women feel fundamentally safe, confident, and genuinely in control of their digital lives.
As India’s national digital journey races ahead, a significant segment of its population continues to navigate the landscape far behind. The women inhabiting these rural villages are not engaged in an ideological resistance against technology; rather, they are struggling to navigate a modern world that has accelerated past their access, their institutional support, their confidence, and their trust.
For these women, personal autonomy is not quantified by the number of mobile applications installed on a screen or the volume of digital transactions successfully executed. Instead, it is measured in quiet, hard-won victories: answering a text message without external assistance, verifying a welfare subsidy status independently for the first time, or daring to press a digital button free from the paralyzing fear of failure. Until these minor milestones become ordinary realities, the nation’s high-speed digital future will inevitably leave its women behind.
(Musheera Ashraf is a Laadli Media Fellow. The opinions and views expressed in this report are strictly those of the author. Laadli and UNFPA do not necessarily endorse the views expressed herein.)