“We are a company that builds technology to connect.”
These are the words of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook) from October 2021. He was announcing his company’s rebrand to “reflect who we are and what we hope to build”, signalling a shift to what he called the ‘metaverse‘.
Mark’s metaverse means internet as you know & use it today, but in 3D. So instead of a browser loading 2D webpages on a screen, you walk in the internet in virtual environments – which could be a boardroom or a garden (among many more) – as a digital avatar. Heck, you could do with your own Earth B, one without adults’ neglect burning it down with climate crisis. (Better virtually than never?)
Whether Meta’s succeeding in its push to get people care about its metaverse is a thorny question, one that could swing either way. When you consider the cost of Meta’s Quest 2 Virtual-Reality (VR) headset (which you’ll need to be in the the metaverse), that retails at around Rs. 50,000 in India, you probably are thinking better places to invest that money in. That’s true especially if you’re looking at Apple’s long-rumoured VR headset, expected to cost $3,000 (Rs. 2.46 Lakh) at launch with a ‘cheaper’ model at $1,500 (Rs 1.23 Lakh). Just me, or are you too hearing your parents voices on how many years of school/college fees that’s worth?
Now, these are some of the very first VR headsets, so you can expect the costs to come down just like smartphones’. But the gap between the base price of a smartphone & a VR headset will still be sizeable. And while you may be skeptical (rightfully so) about the future of Mark’s metaverse, there should be no doubts about the desire within the tech industry to reform how we use the internet in some revolutionary way, like how the iPhone did in 2007. Just take the crypto boom in 2021, where Web 3.0 & NFTs were suddenly the internet’s future. Unfortunately, this also means that the internet’s slowly morphing into an increasing necessity, and a luxury at the same time.
Uninstalled: Education, Hope & A Future
Mark’s announcement wasn’t entirely misjudged for its time. We were all working or studying from home, and it didn’t need you a hot-take to imagine that we would be spending the majority of our lives hopping in and out of online lectures and zoom calls.
As someone from a fairly well-sustained family, when I had to pick a laptop for work & online classes, I could set expectations for things like screen refresh rate, CPU clock speeds & having dedicated GPU. In the end, I got a decent laptop that has a neat mix of specs and niceties, like an RGB keyboard for roughly the same cost that the Meta Quest 2 retails for, at the time of writing this piece.
But the privilege that I had and have, isn’t something everyone – or most for that matter – will share. Forget having a laptop (let alone a good one), over half of Indian households get electricity for less than twelve hours a day, as per a 2017 survey by the Ministry of Rural Development. Worsening that is how only one in five children could join an online class towards the end of pandemic. While that figure’s an improvement over the reported 8% equipped for online classes (with a computer that had internet access) at the start of lockdowns, it remains embarrassing for a country that covets its digitization efforts under the ‘Digital India’ banner and has the world’s second largest school system.
Full disclosure, things have improved. Estimates from 2020 suggest that roughly half of India’s population could have a smartphone & an internet connection by this year. But much of this has been due to the onus on e-learning and services like payment going digital. When you see the start of the pandemic, the shift to online education wasn’t as simple as staying back at home and plugging in your laptop charger every morning for most of India, with the worst reserved for the disadvantaged i.e., girl students, lower-caste and tribal communities, low-income families and those from rural areas.
Girls – who are already face threats such as child marriages, poverty & trafficking (feat. patriarchy) – were more likely to drop out of school due to online classes, as evidenced by one estimate that put the number of girls prone to dropping out of schools at around ten million. And if you’re a child without internet access, you’ll likely be staring at the duty of sustaining your family before knowing to add the money you earn.
And although direct links between casteism (’tis alive and kicking) & access to the internet are sparse (in yet another way of caste discrimination), you can look up how casteism (& being a part of any minority in India) goes influences your odds of poverty. In an illustrative example, as per one study’s estimates, roughly 50% of rural Muslim & Hindu Dalits are poor, while the same for Hindus from General Category is far lower, at 14.4%. That influences everything from education access (regardless of mode) to the share of assets a person owns (or doesn’t), due to their caste.
In short, every aforementioned factor is a combo-multiplier of sorts that heightens the odds of you losing out on education, your one objective hope to escape poverty & marginalization. And we haven’t even touched hurdles like network issues, which affects even the best-placed among us.
The Firewall called privilege
As we discuss about the internet, it’s equally important to how one gets there.
Let’s begin with smartphones — possibly the most affordable and accessible way to get online. They have come a long way since the first iPhone revolutionized the mobile industry in 2007, and so have their price points. For instance, while a usable laptop costs around Rs. 30,000-40,000 (note: although you can get a laptop at a price like Rs. 15,000, they’re not good value for long-term use), you can get a well-specced smartphone from around Rs. 5,000-10,000 that gets you the basics, and then some.
Phones priced at around that price-point rupees may be termed as entry-level, but that hasn’t stopped extremes measures like a person from Himachal Pradesh forced to sell a cow so that his daughter can continue her education online. And there’s still a cost that people pay with, despite affording a smartphone: Usability & Privacy. For the sake of an head to head comparison, here’s one:
With any iPhone, the tech divide is evident. It comes at a cost, even for its cheapest model, the SE, but still comes with Apple’s strong commitment to software updates, that keeps your phone running & supporting apps for longer. And a clean OS free of those ads and bloat apps you can’t uninstall often, which means a smoother, more private and faster system. Ironically, the entry-level smartphones – often the lifeline for low-income families – come with slow hardware that’s bogged down by bloat & privacy-invading ads, intended for use by a demographic that will want to use it for the longest time.
So, the very tech that enables us to go online is also why many aren’t in equal footing, or at all; for many, the internet – or connectivity in general – is a jittery, slow & privacy-invasive experience. Laptops, arguably more practical for children attending hours of classes per day, are a whole new chapter of pain cost-wise.
Societal Reform: The OS Update India Needs
Digital divide isn’t so far off from the physical one. Same concepts apply, with the difference being a glass screen. The way I see it, people of all backgrounds being able to access the internet is a sign of societal equity, and true progress on all fronts (that don’t need a politician splurging out on a gazillion front-page ads to convince you).
Step 1: First comes addressing the underlying system level of bloatware we have. As A.R. Vasavi, a social anthropologist and researcher put it in an IndiaSpend report, “Caste and class are largely co-terminus with few exceptions and life-chances in India continue to be based on one’s caste position.” That holds true for internet access, that holds a prime spot among other necessities like food, water & shelter. As I’d stated earlier, caste and anything that’s a minority is a multiplier of financial struggles, and to solve them first, India needs to acknowledge it first. And maybe not make it the political tool that our country’s divides have become. while we’re at it.
This calls for acknowledging & abolishing casteism, dismantling patriarchy & bridging the financial divide, among many other moves. Now, our society’s OS does a great job at keeping these running in the background and tackling discrimination in India can seem near-impossible, but do note, most bloatware can be uninstalled if you know what to do (off-topic, here’s how for android). It calls for your time, but in return you get a freer, longer-lasting system, one that isn’t bogged down by power-leeching processes (i.e., inequalities) in the background.
Step 2: Next, the core basics. Before going online, you need electricity and for the remotest villages to get it, you need a supply that thrives in the remotest. Case in point, a decentralized energy supply that won’t cut you off like centralized coal power would, with wind & solar power, arguably the two major areas of potential today as per the recent IPCC Report.
The transition to cleaner energy also means about 3.4 million new, local jobs by 2030 provided it sticks with its 500 GW renewable power target. Bonus, we’re looking at better livelihoods overall which means more families capable of affording the tech one needs in today’s digital times.
Step 3: With power, you could run your devices but only if you have one. You don’t need to be told that state governments can do their part, handing out free laptops or smartphones like Tamil Nadu’s Govt. does with its Free Laptop Scheme for 10th and 12th pass-outs. What you do need to be told I believe, is that these laptops are inadequate for a student today hopping between Chrome tabs and classes on Zoom or Teams. For example, the laptop’s 2GB RAM is too low in times where 8GB is the expected minimum. For anyone who aspires to do even the bare minimum of gaming or content creation like image/video editing – potential hobbies for students – these would let them sorely wanting (one’s privileges or lack thereof shouldn’t decide their opportunities).
Say, these laptops get children access to YouTube & Teams on the big-screen, where it matters. They do that well, and are better than nothing. Even then, as good-intentioned as steps like Tamil Nadu’s are, these still mean we’re playing a game of whack-a-mole; you hand out free laptops to X amount of students for Y amount of time, where X & Y are finite. Z is the number of (overwhelming and) ever-rising students in need of a laptop. One shouldn’t be in a position to be reliant on government schemes for something as vital as education. That depends on the first two steps.
TL;DR: We need to make quality hardware accessible for all. And that comes with societal equity.
Step 4: Remember when I said India’s like OneUI, packed with potential among other things? That applies to its internet, where you have some solid ground. India’s population means huge demand, which contributes to the fifth cheapest data rates worldwide, at roughly Rs. 7 per GB of data (also partly due to the fierce competition ushered in by Jio). For reference, a GB of data in the US will cost you about Rs. 1,000 ($12.4). This also puts India in the radar of tech companies – like Google with its $1 billion investment in 2022 to get more people with a smartphone among other goals.
I am aware, this isn’t the quick n bullet points’ round of solutions some might have hoped for. And almost everything listed above calls for systemic action in a span of years or even decades; any major step towards bridging the tech divide, demands a lot of active effort and time.
Of course, I could tell you to donate your old tech devices to children who may need it the most. A fundraiser to get smartphones for underprivileged kids? Awesome. But ultimately, much of the problem’s on the system level, hence, my emphasis on systemic action.
When the current web looks for an upgrade to a decentralized, fancier-tech based version in Web 3.0, it’s only fair that we have an upgrade to match. Until then, it will be eight-bit dinosaurs hopping over cactuses for much of India’s underprivileged. And Mark’s vision to build technology that connects, will end up being one that divides more. To step 1 then, let’s go?
This article’s written for a writing #Contest: Digital Access by YKA & Digital Empowerment Foundation in collaboration with Via News Didi.