Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, foremost scholar, economist, jurist, social reformer and political leader of the marginalized, once said that, “There is no doubt, in my opinion, that unless you change your social order you can achieve little by way of progress.”
It is interesting how today, this statement holds as much truth as it did then. As years and generations pass, the subject is the same, only the object changes.
The ‘Digital Divide’ is defined by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as the “gap between individuals, households, businesses, and geographic areas at different socio-economic levels about both their opportunities to access information and communication technologies (ICTs) and to their use of the Internet for a wide variety of activities.”
When the Covid 19 pandemic hit the country, a transformation came into the way we communicate and moreover the way our lifestyle functions. From offices to schools to government service to food delivery, everything underwent a radical change. And to be extremely fair to the country, we were not in a position, at that time, to include all the infrastructure that this change needed.
But, 3 years have passed since the Pandemic’s first assault, and Forbes India has put forth the opinion that India is undergoing a ‘Digital Revolution’.
To a large extent, this is true. The government has taken initiatives like the National Digital Literacy Mission and the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Digital Saksharta Abhiyan to build digital awareness, offices have incorporated a work-from-home feature, freelancing and content writing online jobs have gained popularity, lots of schools have started online classes and colleges have introduced the availability of online courses and degrees.
But, in 2022, The Times of India published an article titled, ‘Digital India is a Global Success Story’, and in a lot of ways, this is not entirely true.
The common mistake people make while estimating development is to overlook the equitable distribution of that development. A country cannot boast of development if that development does not apply to ALL it’s citizens.
UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed has been noted to say that the digital divide has the potential to be the “new face of inequality”. What this means is that a digital transformation that does not include everyone, a digital transformation that is not intersectional, has the power to create a new age of the old order of the Haves and Have-Nots.
The Oxfam Report titled, ‘India Inequality Report 2022: Digital Divide’ revealed the inequalities present in digital access, which unfortunately mirror our societal inequalities.
The India Development Review states that 44% of the urban population has access to the Internet while in rural areas, only 17% do. On the other hand, only 4% of students from the SC/ST communities had access to the Internet.
When I first read the statistics, all I could think about is this quote by Periyar E.V. Ramasamy, “If a larger country oppresses a smaller country, I’ll stand with the smaller country. If the smaller country has majoritarian religion that oppresses minority religions, I’ll stand with minority religions. If the minority religion has caste and one caste oppresses another caste, I’ll stand with the caste being oppressed. In the oppressed caste, if an employer oppresses his employee, I’ll stand with the employee If the employee goes home and oppresses his wife, I’ll stand with that woman. Overall, Oppression is my enemy.”
The relevance of these words today is not the only thing that grabs attention. What Periyar has said here also encapsulates the social hierarchy present in the country. The same social hierarchy is reflected in the digital divide’s statistics.
In ancient Vedic India, only the higher varnas were allowed access to education. The lower castes were not allowed to learn. And, unsurprisingly, neither were the women, upper caste or otherwise. This is mainly what led to these sections of society becoming backwards and undeveloped. But, of course, times changed, and so did conditions. Education now is much more widely available to everyone than it was before. Yet, this report opens up our eyes to the long and depressing reach of our social system affecting our economics, politics, development and education.
It is a hierarchy, with an urban, upper-caste man at the top, and a rural, lower-caste woman at the bottom. Of course, like any other hierarchy, this one too has its exceptions to discrimination. Money for one, is what causes the biggest exceptions. But, the problem is that our society has also to a large extent dictated who gets to be rich, and who is supposed to die poor, slaving on land, not even their own.
During the pandemic, we saw the greatest disparity in terms of digital access when it came to the fields of Education and Healthcare.
While schools initiated a series of online classes, students in remote rural areas either had to walk miles and climb to dangerous heights, just to get network, or had no access to the internet at all. Here we see that this divide has affected the basis of our societal foundation— If the digital divide causes inequality in terms of education, then in turn, it will affect all the other spheres of life.
On the other hand, registration for the Covid vaccines was done through the CoWin app, and the difficulties it caused were evident— the digitisation of healthcare made it extremely hard for people without phones, laptops and internet connection to access healthcare services. The implications of this are drastic— if a person cannot access the internet effectively, does that mean that they will be unable to access healthcare either?
The main problem here is that all these steps were taken without adequate digital literacy or infrastructure, in a country which as yet does not have internet access for all.
India is said to have a gender gap of 40.4% in terms of internet access, the widest gender gap in the whole of Asia-Pacific.
While researching upon the same, I came across a line that perfectly sums up how the digital divide affects the gender gap— “If one family has just one phone, there is a good chance that the wife or the daughter will be the last one to use it.”
This is not just a reflection of the digital divide but also a reflection of our societal and familial prejudices affecting who gets to access the internet and who doesn’t.
The transgender community is another marginalised sector of our society which is gravely affected by digital illiteracy and lack of resources to access adequate digital facilities. We have already seen during Covid how many people belonging to the transgender community were discriminated against when they tried to receive healthcare or sent back home by virtue of the disparity between the gender on their birth certificates and their gender identity.
Although the government’s Niti Ayog has acknowledged the presence of the widespread digital divide in our country, it remains to be seen how many of it’s policies and proposals actually help in equalising this divide on the ground level.
The most important step to be taken to bridge this gap starts at the grass roots— Our educational institutions. Internet access has become a fundamental necessity for students because our education system is undergoing a radical change. Work done in class is being sent through WhatsApp, classes are being taken online and the use of the internet to gather information has increased. In such a case, if some students have access to the internet, while others don’t, then this would only mean that a new aspect of privilege has entered our society.
Digital learning and awareness have to be immediately implemented in all schools, government and private, rural and urban, so that at least the next generation of citizens have a more even standing in society.
Next, awareness camps and learning centres should be opened up to provide free courses on digital learning, at least on the basic level to all the existing citizens of the country. The concentration of these centres should be increased in rural and underdeveloped areas, while in the city, special importance must be given to those sections which do not usually get opportunities of education, like the slum areas, factory workers, housewives, daily wage earners and the transgender community.
These courses should be delivered in vernacular languages, and there should be special classes conducted by women, for women, to convince women from conservative patriarchal backgrounds to take part in it.
Besides this, it is high time that the government introduces a new Ministry that deals solely with the Digitalisation of India. Of course the Ministry of Electronics and IT does exist, but that is not enough. With a concrete governmental body, we can hope for rapid progress in spreading digital literacy and awareness.
All of this will be impossible without adequate Internet connection. The country has to increase its digital reach to connect with the rural sectors. From areas consisting of dense, impassable forest land to the desert sands of the Thar, every remote inch of the country has to have at least some minimum network coverage. While on this front, the country has accomplished a great deal, or as Tech Wire Asia puts it, ‘India’s internet connectivity has doubled in just 4 years’, there are still places in the far remote boundaries of the country which suffer from lack of internet. The fundamental thing to note here is that Connectivity is different from Access. Internet connectivity maybe everywhere, but it is accessible only to few.
Of course, the fundamental core of this problem is encapsulated in what I started this essay with. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s words which make us realise that the Digital Divide is not just an educational, or economic, or administrative problem. Above all, it is a social problem. Without reforming society at large, from within, we cannot hope to bridge this divide. Until the time villages are neglected, women are oppressed and caste bias runs rampant in this country, we cannot hope for development… at least not development that is equitable and true to it’s meaning.
We can only hope for reform when we stand against a societal order that has maimed and wounded it’s own people for centuries. And this reform starts from within each of us. It starts when we accept each other, and it starts when at family dinner- table conversations, we bravely stand against the generational prejudices passed down to us.
It starts when we acknowledge the generational damage caused to the women, tribals and Dalits of the country and when we accept that we cannot justify, in any sane world, the abolition of protective discrimination toward them. It starts when the villages, our sustainers, are given as much, if not more important, than the industrial cities.
This change starts when the government creates active bodies that are fruitful in their endeavour to bridge this gap.
This change starts with Awareness and, most importantly, Action.
picture credit: Kevin Siers
#Contest: Digital Access