By Musheera Ashraf
Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh: India’s contemporary narrative is routinely celebrated through a dizzying array of technological milestones. Millions of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions pulse through the national grid every single minute. Seamless online public services promise transparency and reach. Government welfare schemes are increasingly tethered to dedicated mobile applications, digital verifications, and automated bank transfers.
Yet, far away from this glittering vision of a hyper-connected nation—in rural villages where smartphones are frequently shared household commodities, passwords are guessed, and digital literacy remains a luxury—women continue to stand at the margins of a world that has shifted far faster than they could possibly follow.
This stark reality is evident in the daily routine of Musayyada, a thirty-five-year-old widow residing in a village situated roughly ten kilometres from Saharanpur. Her day begins long before the city stirs awake. She boards a crowded local tempo at dawn to visit the designated gas agency, driven by a pressing mission: to inquire why her cooking gas cylinder subsidy has failed to reflect in her account for three consecutive months. By the time she arrives after her arduous journey, a long queue has already formed outside the agency’s gates.
When her turn finally arrives, the staff inform her bluntly that her subsidy will only be released if she purchases a new gas pipe, which they insist is mandatory. Musayyada blinks in disbelief, caught off guard by the arbitrary demand. "I changed the pipe just a month ago. I do not need it," she protests. The staff’s reply is flat, almost rehearsed: "It is mandatory. Even if you do not need it now, you can use it later."
The unwanted pipe costs her two hundred rupees—roughly equivalent to the cost of a full day’s meals for her family of four. For a household operating on the thinnest of margins, an unnecessary mandate of two hundred rupees represents a severe financial strain, borne entirely out of a lack of institutional recourse and digital empowerment.
Musayyada carries a second-hand mobile phone that she purchased for twenty-five hundred rupees, an amount she managed to clear through painful financial installments. "A phone is necessary now. Even if we skip a meal, we have to keep a phone," she reflects. Yet, her operational command over the device is severely restricted. She can use it to receive incoming calls and dial her daughter, who lives in a neighbouring village. For virtually every other digital requirement, she is forced to rely on the shopkeeper next door—even for the routine booking of her liquefied petroleum gas (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 explains. "There are two zeroes at the end."
Across rural India, women routinely depend on neighbours, local shopkeepers, and male family members to execute the most fundamental digital tasks. These hands, predominantly male, handle everything from booking cooking gas cylinders to checking welfare subsidy statuses and updating bank records. Trust inevitably fills the vast chasm left by systemic digital illiteracy, but this reliance comes with profound hidden risks.
In another household in the region, an elderly woman found herself bewildered by a barrage of unexpected phone calls from complete strangers. It was later discovered that a relative had used her personal mobile number to register multiple unverified online accounts without her knowledge or clear consent. "I had no idea why people were calling me by someone else’s name," recalls sixty-two-year-old Savitri.
These incidents may appear small when viewed against the sweeping backdrop of India’s monumental digital push, but they powerfully illustrate how easily the boundary between misplaced trust and acute vulnerability blurs for those unequipped to navigate the digital architecture independently.
A decade into the ambitious nationwide Digital India mission, a persistent and deeply entrenched gendered digital divide continues to dictate terms on who is permitted to participate meaningfully in the economy and who must remain standing outside the metaphorical door. Data indicates that nearly forty per cent 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 proportion exercise little to no independent control over its usage, apps, or data.
This digital chasm grows even sharper when examining the domain of digital finance. Men in rural and semi-urban settings are significantly more prone to performing UPI financial transactions, with research pointing to a substantial gender gap exceeding thirteen percentage points. Official national UPI statistics rarely reflect this disparity because the underlying data is not regularly disaggregated or published by gender. However, industry insiders working intimately within the digital payments ecosystem readily acknowledge the stark imbalance.
In 2023, a senior official at Google Pay noted publicly that women constituted 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. Across semi-urban and rural landscapes, these numbers plummet even further.
The hesitation to embrace financial technology is not merely a matter of access; it is deeply rooted in apprehension. A fifty-year-old schoolteacher in Saharanpur has a fully functional UPI payment application installed on 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, expressing a fear common among her peers. Whenever she needs to settle a bill or make a payment, she hands her device over to her son. "If something goes wrong, I will be blamed. Better not to try."
Fear functions as an unseen yet immensely powerful barrier in the lives of rural women. Many express a preference for physical cash transactions, not because they lack general awareness of modern conveniences, but because they completely lack the institutional confidence required to rectify errors. They have traded stories of financial fraud, stolen passwords, reversed transactions gone wrong, and mobile phones getting permanently blocked after too many failed authentication attempts. For these women, making a digital mistake carries psychological and social consequences that feel infinitely heavier than managing physical currency mistakes.
Sita, a thirty-year-old newly married woman, sums up the dynamic with striking simplicity. She has never booked her own LPG cylinder. "My husband does it. I do not have a phone," she states matter-of-factly. She occasionally uses her husband’s phone, but exclusively to watch videos on YouTube. "If something goes wrong, I will have to hear from everyone," she adds, highlighting the domestic scrutiny women face when interacting with technology.
This persistent dread of making a mistake is not an irrational imagination. It is shaped by years of social conditioning where women are consistently told to be exceedingly cautious, routinely blamed for administrative errors, and given virtually zero room to experiment, fail, and learn. Meanwhile, the digital ecosystem continues to expand relentlessly. Government welfare schemes are perpetually linked to new applications, subsidies require periodic digital re-verification, SIM cards demand ongoing biometric revalidation, and banking institutions insist on rigorous Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance. Each newly added procedural step demands an institutional confidence that many rural women have never been permitted or supported to build.
Online content creators frequently capture adjacent layers of this socio-cultural reality. Recently, an Instagram creator operating under the handle @lifeofpuja remarked in a widely viewed video that no matter how hard she works or how many digital followers she manages to earn, she remains pigeonholed as someone’s wife or daughter-in-law. Rural women echo this sentiment in quieter, less visible ways. They rarely receive social recognition or validation for learning complex new digital skills. Their primary identity remains firmly anchored to household chores and familial duties, completely detached from their technological capabilities.
According to Sarvothanam, a Delhi-based civil society organization dedicated to online safety and digital literacy training, the core issue extends far beyond basic literacy into the realm of systemic dependence. "Women who do not know how to operate their phones independently rely heavily on others. But those exact same people can easily misuse their granted access. Personal photographs, private messages, and even their sensitive One-Time Passwords (OTPs) are frequently shared without them truly understanding what is happening," explains a representative of the organization.
Despite the formidable challenges, pockets of organic change are slowly unfolding across the region. In a village located near Deoband, Rahima, who proudly stands as the first university graduate in her family, spends her time teaching foundational digital tasks to her mother and neighboring women. "I tell them how to open incoming SMS messages, how to find saved contacts in the phonebook, and how to identify suspicious links," she shares. It is slow, painstaking work, but it is driven by genuine care and community solidarity rather than fear.
Parveen, a social worker actively engaged with rural women across Saharanpur in Western Uttar Pradesh, emphasizes that the path forward demands intensive handholding, structured community-led training programs, and dedicated women-led digital learning circles. "Digital empowerment is not merely about distributing a physical electronic device. It is about making women feel safe, secure, confident, and completely in control of their own digital footprint," notes a digital rights volunteer working closely with rural communities in the region.
India’s broader national digital journey continues to race ahead at a breakneck pace, but a significant portion of its population is still walking cautiously behind. The women inhabiting these villages are not offering deliberate resistance to modern technology; rather, they are struggling to navigate a socio-economic world that has evolved far faster than their access, their confidence, and their trust structures.
For these women, personal autonomy is not measured in downloaded applications or completed digital transactions. Instead, it is measured in quiet, hard-won victories: answering an incoming text message without asking for assistance, checking a cooking gas subsidy status independently for the very first time, or daring to press a touchscreen button without the debilitating fear of failure. And until these modest victories become ordinary, everyday occurrences, the nation’s high-tech digital future will continue to leave its women standing behind the closed door.
(Musheera Ashraf is a Laadli Media Fellow. The opinions and views expressed in this report are those of the author. Laadli and UNFPA do not necessarily endorse the expressed views.)