By Musheera Ashraf
Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh: India’s contemporary narrative is routinely told through staggering digital milestones. Millions of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions zip through cyberspace every single minute, powering everything from street-side vegetable carts to high-end boutiques. Seamless online government portals promise transparency and instant delivery of public services, while welfare schemes are increasingly tied to mobile applications and biometric verification.
Yet, far away from this gleaming vision of a cashless, frictionless economy, a different reality unfolds in rural pockets. In villages where mobile phones are shared among family members, passwords are guessed, and technical jargon remains alien, women continue to stand at the very margins of a technological shift that moved much faster than they could follow.
This chasm is visible at dawn ten kilometres outside Saharanpur, where thirty-five-year-old Musheera—a widow—begins her day long before the city wakes. She boards a crowded tempo to visit the local gas agency to find out why her cooking gas cylinder subsidy has failed to reflect in her account for three consecutive months. By the time she arrives after a bumpy ride, a long queue has already formed outside the agency’s gates.
When her turn finally arrives, the staff offer a blunt explanation: she will only receive her pending subsidy if she purchases a new gas pipe, which employees insist is mandatory. Musheera blinks in disbelief.
"I changed the pipe just a month ago. I do not need it," she tells them.
The reply is flat, almost rehearsed, leaving no room for negotiation: "It is mandatory. Even if you do not need it now, you can use it later."
The unnecessary pipe costs her two hundred rupees—roughly equivalent to the cost of a day’s meals for her family of four. For a household operating on extremely tight margins, such arbitrary expenses imposed by digital mandates represent a heavy financial blow.
Musheera carries a second-hand mobile phone that she purchased for twenty-five hundred rupees, an amount she managed to pay off in difficult installments. "A phone is necessary now. Even if we skip a meal, we have to keep a phone," she explains.
However, her technical engagement with the device is severely restricted. She can use it only to receive incoming calls and dial her daughter, who lives in another village. For every other essential task—ranging from reading a formal notification to checking welfare balances—she must walk over and rely on the shopkeeper next door, including the simple act of booking her LPG cylinder. When asked how she remembers her daughter’s phone number without being able to read or write, she laughs shyly and offers a simple mnemonic: "Akhir me do zero hain." (There are two zeroes at the end).
Across rural India, women depend heavily on neighbours, local shopkeepers, and male family members to navigate the most basic digital interactions. These hands, predominantly male, execute everything from booking cooking fuel to tracking government welfare disbursements. While trust fills the vast void left by systemic digital illiteracy, it carries profound, often hidden risks.
In another household in the region, an elderly woman found herself incessantly distressed by calls from complete strangers. It later emerged that a relative had used her personal mobile number to register multiple unmonitored online accounts and commercial platforms 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 such incidents are often dismissed as minor administrative glitches in the grand chronicle of India’s expansive digital push, they starkly illustrate how easily the boundary between blind trust and deep vulnerability blurs for those unequipped to navigate cyberspace independently.
Ten years into the ambitious Digital India mission, a persistent gendered digital divide continues to dictate who gets to participate in the modern economy and who must stand outside the locked door. Statistics indicate that nearly forty per cent fewer rural women own smartphones compared to men. Among the subset of women who do manage to own devices, a significant portion exercises little to no control over how, when, or why those devices are used.
This divide becomes even sharper when examining digital finance. Men outpace women in performing UPI transactions by a striking margin of 13.7 percentage points. Official national UPI statistics frequently fail to reflect this granular difference because transaction volumes are rarely disaggregated by gender. However, industry insiders working within the payment ecosystem readily acknowledge the underlying imbalance.
In 2023, a senior Google Pay executive publicly noted that women accounted for less than thirty percent of active UPI users. A year later, a representative from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) shared a similarly conservative estimate. These figures shrink even further when isolating semi-urban and deeply rural demographics.
A fifty-year-old schoolteacher residing in Saharanpur has a fully functional UPI 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. Instead, she routinely hands her device over to her son whenever she needs to settle a bill or transfer funds. "If something goes wrong, I will be blamed. Better not to try."
Psychological barriers, particularly fear, act as powerful invisible walls. Many rural women articulate a clear preference for physical cash, not out of a lack of basic awareness, but due to a profound lack of confidence born from isolation. They have heard unsettling stories of financial fraud, stolen passwords, accidental fund transfers, and phones getting permanently blocked after too many failed authentication attempts. For these women, making a digital mistake carries a much heavier social and financial penalty than making a physical one.
Sita, a thirty-year-old newly married woman, summarizes the sentiment with stark simplicity. She has never booked her own LPG cylinder and remains entirely detached from the process.
"My husband does it. I do not have a phone," she says. When she occasionally uses his device, it is strictly to watch entertainment videos on YouTube. "If something goes wrong, I will have to hear from everyone," she adds, pointing to the constant scrutiny women face when venturing into unfamiliar territory.
This acute fear of making an error is not an irrational imagination. It is shaped by years of conditioning—of being cautioned to be perpetually careful, of being disproportionately blamed for household errors, and of having minimal room to experiment or fail safely. Meanwhile, digital governance systems march forward relentlessly. Welfare schemes are strictly linked to mobile apps, subsidies require recurring digital updates, SIM cards demand periodic revalidation, banks insist on rigorous digital KYC compliance, and energy agencies direct customers to check their delivery statuses online. Each newly added digital layer demands a level of self-assurance and technical literacy that many women have never been given the social space or institutional support to build.
Independent digital content creators online frequently capture complementary dimensions of this societal reality. Recently, an Instagram creator operating under the handle @lifeofpuja remarked in a viral video that regardless of how hard she works professionally or how many followers she earns, she is still primarily recognized in her community strictly in relation to her male relatives—as someone’s wife or daughter-in-law. Rural women echo this exact sentiment in quieter, more localized ways, where individual competence and mastery over new skills often go unrecognized unless validated by male household heads.
Civil society organizations are increasingly attempting to spotlight these systemic roadblocks. Sarvothanam, a Delhi-based non-profit organization specializing in online safety and digital literacy training, points out that the core crisis is not merely a lack of literacy, but structural dependence.
"Women who do not know how to use their phones rely on others. But those same people can misuse their access. Personal photographs, private messages, and even their confidential OTPs are shared without them fully knowing what is happening," a representative from the organization explains.
Despite the heavy headwinds, pockets of organic change are slowly unfolding on the ground. In a village situated near Deoband, Rahima—the very first college graduate in her family—spends her time teaching basic digital literacy 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 shares. It is slow, painstaking work, but it is driven by genuine community care rather than top-down bureaucratic mandates.
Parveen, a social worker who has spent years assisting rural women across Saharanpur in western Uttar Pradesh, emphasizes that the path forward requires intensive handholding, grassroots community training sessions, 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 entirely in control," notes a digital rights volunteer active in the region.
India’s overarching digital journey is racing ahead at breakneck speed, yet a significant portion of its population continues to walk carefully behind it. The women inhabiting these villages are not offering ideological resistance to modern technology; rather, they are struggling to navigate a socio-economic landscape that shifted much faster than their access, their digital confidence, and their institutional trust.
For them, autonomy is not measured in the number of applications successfully installed or digital transactions completed. Instead, it is measured in quiet, personal victories: answering a text message without asking for help, checking a welfare subsidy status independently for the very first time, or daring to press a screen button without the paralyzing fear of failure. And until these modest victories become ordinary, everyday occurrences, 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.)