By Musheera Ashraf
Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh: India’s digital narrative is frequently told through staggering macro-level statistics. Observers marvel at the millions of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions executed every minute, the widespread adoption of seamless online public services, and the extensive integration of government welfare schemes with mobile applications. Yet, far removed from this glossy vision of a frictionless, tech-enabled nation, a different reality unfolds in rural interiors. In villages where smartphones are often shared family commodities and digital passwords are guessed or handled by intermediaries, women continue to stand at the precarious margins of an economic and social world that has shifted far faster than they could follow.
This digital disconnect is starkly visible in the daily life of thirty-five-year-old Musayyada, a widow residing in a village located roughly ten kilometres from Saharanpur. Her day begins long before the urban centers wake up. She boards a crowded local tempo at the break of dawn, making the arduous journey to the local gas agency simply to inquire why her cooking gas cylinder subsidy has failed to reflect in her account for three consecutive months. By the time she arrives at the agency office, a long queue has already formed outside the gate, signaling the bureaucratic hurdles ahead.
When her turn finally arrives, the agency staff inform her 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 an arbitrary condition. "I changed the pipe just a month ago. I do not need it," she protests. The reply from the staff is flat, almost rehearsed to dismiss consumer grievances: "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 roughly equivalent to the cost of a full day’s meals for her family of four. For someone surviving on the margins, an unexpected, forced expenditure of this magnitude is a heavy blow, made worse by her inability to check or contest administrative mandates online.
Musayyada carries a second-hand smartphone, which she managed to purchase for twenty-five hundred rupees through a modest installment plan. "A phone is necessary now. Even if we skip a meal, we have to keep a phone," she explains, highlighting the paradoxical centrality of technology in poverty. However, her command over the device is severely restricted. She can only use it to receive incoming calls and dial her daughter who lives in another village. For virtually every other digital requirement, she has to rely on the shopkeeper next door—even for the routine booking of her LPG gas 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 of the sequence.
Across rural India, women routinely depend on neighbors, local shopkeepers, and male family members to execute the most basic digital tasks. These hands, predominantly male, handle everything from booking cooking gas to checking welfare subsidy statuses. While trust often fills the vast chasm left by systemic digital illiteracy, it is a fragile bridge that comes with hidden risks and a loss of personal autonomy.
In another household in the region, an elderly woman found herself repeatedly distressed by incoming calls from complete strangers. 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. While incidents like these might appear minor in the grand narrative of India’s sweeping digital push, they vividly illustrate how easily the boundary between mutual trust and profound vulnerability can blur for those who do not control their own digital footprint.
A decade into the ambitious Digital India mission, a persistent gendered digital divide continues to dictate structural inclusion—determining precisely who gets to participate in the modern economy and who must remain standing outside the locked door. Data indicates that nearly forty per cent fewer rural women own smartphones compared to men. Furthermore, among the women who do technically own devices, a significant portion exercises little to no independent control over their usage, content, or security settings.
This divide becomes even sharper when examining digital finance. Men in India are markedly more likely to perform UPI transactions than women, with a gap estimated at roughly 13.7 percentage points. Official national UPI statistics frequently fail to reflect this underlying disparity because transaction volumes are rarely broken down by gender. However, industry insiders working directly within the digital payments ecosystem readily acknowledge the imbalance. In 2023, a senior Google Pay official publicly noted that women constituted less than thirty percent of active UPI users. A year later, a representative from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) echoed a remarkably similar estimate. These already low numbers plunge even further when shifting focus strictly to semi-urban and rural demographics.
The hesitation to embrace digital finance is rooted in tangible anxieties rather than mere technophobia. A fifty-year-old schoolteacher living in Saharanpur has a UPI application downloaded 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, voicing a common dread. When she needs to make a digital payment, she routinely hands her device over to her son. "If something goes wrong, I will be blamed. Better not to try."
Fear operates as an unseen but exceptionally powerful barrier for rural women. Many express a clear preference for physical cash, not because they lack general awareness of modern trends, but because they lack systemic confidence and fear the punitive consequences of error. They have heard unsettling stories of financial fraud, stolen passwords, accidental monetary transfers, and phones getting permanently blocked after too many failed authentication attempts. For women with zero financial safety net, making a digital mistake feels infinitely heavier and more consequential than making a physical one.
Sita, a thirty-year-old newly married woman, sums up the dynamic with stark simplicity. She has never booked her own LPG cylinder because, as she puts it, "My husband does it. I do not have a phone." She occasionally uses her husband’s phone, but strictly to watch entertainment videos on YouTube. "If something goes wrong, I will have to hear from everyone," she adds, highlighting the domestic scrutiny and accountability women face whenever they attempt to navigate spaces traditionally managed by men.
This pervasive fear of making a mistake is not an irrational imagination. It is carefully shaped by years of social conditioning, of being repeatedly told to exercise excessive caution, of being disproportionately blamed for household or financial errors, and of having virtually no institutional room to experiment, fail, and learn. Meanwhile, public and private digital services continue to expand at a breakneck pace. Government welfare schemes are perpetually linked to dedicated mobile applications, crucial subsidies require online updates, SIM cards demand periodic revalidation, banks insist on stringent Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols, and energy agencies direct customers to check their delivery statuses online. Each newly added digital layer demands a baseline of technological confidence that many rural women have never been allowed or empowered to build.
Contemporary digital culture captures parallel layers of this reality. Recently, a popular online content creator known as @lifeofpuja remarked in an Instagram video that regardless of how hard she works or how many followers she accumulates, she is still predominantly identified and restricted as someone’s wife or daughter-in-law. Rural women echo this sentiment in quieter, less public ways. They rarely receive social validation or recognition for learning new digital skills, as their core identity remains strictly tied to domestic servitude rather than technological capability.
Experts working on grassroots digital inclusion point out that the crisis extends far beyond basic literacy. Sarvothanam, a New Delhi-based organization dedicated to online safety and digital training initiatives, emphasizes that the core issue is systemic dependence. A representative from the organization explains that women who do not know how to independently operate their phones must rely on others, leaving them exposed. "The same people can misuse their access. Personal photos, private messages, even their One-Time Passwords (OTPs) are shared without them truly knowing what is happening in the background."
Despite these formidable structural challenges, pockets of organic change are slowly unfolding at the grassroots level. In a village situated near Deoband, Rahima—the very first university graduate in her family—spends her time trying to impart basic digital literacy to her mother and neighboring women. She patiently instructs them on how to open incoming SMS text messages, how to locate saved contacts in an address book, and how to identify suspicious, fraudulent links. It is slow, painstaking work, but it is driven entirely by genuine care rather than institutional coercion.
Parveen, a social worker operating among rural communities in Saharanpur, argues that the path forward requires intensive handholding, localized community training programs, and dedicated women-led digital learning circles. A digital rights volunteer active in western Uttar Pradesh reinforces this perspective, noting that true empowerment cannot be reduced to merely distributing hardware. "Digital empowerment is not only about giving a device. It is about making women feel safe, confident and in control," the volunteer asserts.
India’s overarching digital journey continues to race ahead at a historic pace, yet a substantial segment of the population is still forced to walk cautiously behind it. The women residing in these villages are not engaged in an ideological resistance against modern technology; rather, they are struggling to navigate a complex socio-economic world that moved forward much faster than their access, their institutional support, their confidence, and their trust.
For them, true autonomy is not measured by the number of applications installed on a screen or financial transactions successfully completed. Instead, it is measured in quiet, personal victories—answering an unexpected text message without assistance, checking a cooking gas subsidy status independently for the very first time, or daring to press a digital button without the crippling fear of failure. Until these minor milestones become ordinary, everyday occurrences, India’s much-lauded 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.)