Musheera Ashraf, Twocircles.net
Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh: India’s digital story is often told through numbers. Millions of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions occur every minute. Seamless online services connect citizens to governance. Government schemes are increasingly linked directly to mobile applications, painting a picture of an advanced, hyper-connected society. But far away from this gleaming vision, in villages where phones are shared and passwords are guessed, women continue to stand at the margins of a world that has shifted faster than they could possibly follow.
Musayyada, a thirty-five-year-old widow from a village located roughly ten kilometres from Saharanpur, begins her day long before the city wakes. She boards a crowded local tempo at dawn to visit the designated gas agency, driven by an urgent need to ask why her cooking gas cylinder subsidy has failed to arrive for three months. By the time she reaches the office, a long queue has already formed outside the locked gate.
When her turn finally arrives, agency staff inform her that she will receive her pending subsidy only if she purchases a mandatory gas pipe. Musayyada blinks in disbelief. She recently replaced her equipment. "I changed the pipe just a month ago. I do not need it," she explains to the clerk. The reply is flat, delivered with the mechanical indifference of a rehearsed script: "It is mandatory. Even if you do not need it now, you can use it later."
The unwanted pipe costs her two hundred rupees, an amount that roughly equals the cost of a full day’s meals for her family of four. For Musayyada, who lives on the absolute edge of financial security, such arbitrary expenses are deeply disruptive.
She carries a second-hand mobile phone that she purchased for twenty-five hundred rupees, a sum she managed to pay off in installments. "A phone is necessary now. Even if we skip a meal, we have to keep a phone," she acknowledges, reflecting the harsh realities of modern administrative linkage. Yet, her technological engagement is severely restricted. She uses the device exclusively to receive incoming calls and to dial her daughter, who lives in a different village. For everything else, she is forced to rely on the shopkeeper next door, including the simple task of booking her LPG gas cylinder. When asked how she manages to remember her daughter’s phone number without being able to read or write digits, she laughs shyly. "Akhir me do zero hain," she says, explaining that she identifies the contact because there are two zeroes at the end.
Across rural India, women depend heavily on neighbours, local shopkeepers, and family members for the most basic digital tasks. These helping hands, predominantly male, execute everything from booking LPG cylinders to checking the status of government financial subsidies. Trust routinely fills the vast gap left by systemic digital illiteracy, but this reliance comes with profound risks and hidden vulnerabilities.
In another household in the region, an older woman experienced constant anxiety after receiving repeated calls from strangers because a male relative had casually used her mobile number to register multiple online accounts. "I had no idea why people were calling me by someone else’s name," 62-year-old Savitri recalls. These individual anecdotes may appear small within the grand narrative of India’s sweeping digital push, but they powerfully illustrate how easily the boundary between misplaced trust and personal vulnerability blurs in rural spaces.
Ten years into the ambitious Digital India mission, a persistent gendered digital divide continues to dictate who gets to participate fully in the modern economy and who must stand outside the door. Data indicates that nearly forty per cent fewer rural women own smartphones compared to men. Among the women who do manage to own devices, a significant portion exercises little to no independent control over them or their contents.
This divide becomes even sharper when examining digital finance. Men outpace women in performing UPI transactions by a notable gap of 13.7 percentage points. Official UPI statistics rarely reflect this underlying disparity because transaction data is not systematically broken down by gender. However, industry insiders working directly within the payment ecosystem readily acknowledge the imbalance. In 2023, a senior Google Pay official publicly stated that women accounted for less than thirty percent of total UPI users. In 2024, a representative from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) shared a similarly conservative estimate. These already low numbers drop even further when focused specifically on semi-urban and rural areas.
Fear serves as an unseen but powerful barrier reinforcing this exclusion. A fifty-year-old schoolteacher living in Saharanpur has a fully functional UPI application installed on her phone, but she steadfastly refuses to use it. "What if the money goes to the wrong person? Who will return it to me?" she asks. Instead, she routinely hands her phone over to her son whenever she needs to make a digital payment. "If something goes wrong, I will be blamed. Better not to try."
Many rural women echo this sentiment, explaining that they actively prefer cash transactions not because they lack general awareness, but because they completely lack confidence in digital environments. They have heard unsettling stories of financial fraud, stolen passwords, reversed transactions gone wrong, and mobile accounts permanently blocked after too many failed verification attempts. For them, making a digital mistake carries social and financial consequences that feel far heavier than physical ones.
Sita, a thirty-year-old newly married woman, sums up this hesitation simply. She has never booked her own LPG cylinder. "My husband does it. I do not have a phone," she says. When she does use her husband’s device, it is strictly to watch YouTube videos. "If something goes wrong, I will have to hear from everyone," she adds, highlighting the domestic scrutiny women face when interacting with technology.
The fear of making an error is not an imagined phenomenon. It is shaped by years of social conditioning, of being told to exercise extreme caution, of being disproportionately blamed for household errors, and of having very little room to experiment or fail safely. Meanwhile, digital governance and commercial services continue to expand at a rapid pace. Government welfare schemes are perpetually linked to dedicated apps. Subsidies require periodic digital updates. SIM cards demand revalidation. Banks strictly insist on Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance. LPG distributors direct customers to check their delivery statuses online. Each newly added digital step demands a baseline of confidence that many rural women have simply never been allowed to build.
Online content creators capture yet another layer of this complex reality. Recently, an Instagram creator using the handle @lifeofpuja noted in a video that no matter how hard she works or how many followers she accumulates, she remains primarily identified as someone’s wife or daughter-in-law. Rural women echo this sentiment in quieter, more localized ways. They routinely fail to receive recognition for learning new digital skills, as their core identity remains strictly tied to domestic household labor rather than technological competence.
Representatives from Sarvothanam, a Delhi-based organization dedicated to online safety and digital literacy training, point out that the core issue extends far beyond basic literacy into the realm of enforced dependence. "Women who do not know how to use their phones independently rely on others. But those same people can misuse their access. Personal photos, private messages, and even their One-Time Passwords are shared without them truly understanding what is happening," an organization member explains.
Despite these formidable challenges, glimmers of grassroots change are slowly unfolding. In a village situated near Deoband, Rahima, who proudly stands as the first university graduate in her family, spends her time teaching basic digital tasks to her mother and neighboring women. "I tell them how to open incoming SMS messages, how to find saved contacts, and how to identify suspicious links," she says. It is slow, painstaking work, but it is driven entirely by genuine care rather than fear.
Parveen, a social worker operating among rural communities in Saharanpur, western Uttar Pradesh, emphasizes that the path forward requires intensive handholding, structured community training initiatives, and dedicated women-led digital learning circles. "Digital empowerment is not only about distributing a device. It is about making women feel safe, confident, and genuinely in control," notes a digital rights volunteer active in the same region.
India’s overarching digital journey is racing ahead at breakneck speed, but a significant portion of the country is still walking carefully behind it. The women inhabiting these villages are not resisting modern technology by choice; rather, they are struggling to navigate a fast-paced world that has moved forward far quicker than their access, their confidence, and their trust could accommodate.
For these women, true autonomy is not measured in apps successfully installed or financial transactions smoothly completed. Instead, it is measured in quiet victories: answering an incoming text message without asking for help, checking a subsidy status independently for the very first time, or daring to press a digital button without the crippling fear of reprisal. Until these small victories become entirely ordinary, the nation’s digital future will continue to 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 these views.)