Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) aims to connect unreached and underserved communities of India in an effort to bring them out of digital darkness and empower them with information access through last mile connectivity, digital literacy and digital interventions. With the motto to ‘Inform, Communicate and Empower,’ DEF finds sustainable ICT solutions to overcome information poverty in remote and rural locations of India. However, allow this opportunity to tell you what digital exclusion means for poor and marginalised communities living in rural and remote locations of India.
There are about 300 million people in India who have no access to electricity. According to a World Bank report, 1.063 billion people are offline in India. And we must understand that the one billion mobile phone subscriptions we keep reading about are not one billion unique users but one million SIM cards. And we can understand the rural-urban divide is we take a look at an RMAI report from 2015 that stated that only 38 percent subscriptions were from rural India.
Most of those who live in rural and remote locations of India have to travel more than 10-15km to access a simple photocopying service. And this could cost him anywhere between Rs.100 to Rs. 250. If you’re wondering how, understand this: the person has to skip a day’s work and lose out on his wage of Rs. 200. He then has to pay another Rs. 30-40 for travelling from his village to the nearest block to access the service for at the cost of about Rs. 10 per page.
As many as 72% Indian women do not have access to mobile phones, according to a GSMA report of 2016 titled Connected Women. And the story is no different in other developing countries. Over 1.7 billion women do not own mobile phones in low and middle-income countries. In fact, according to the same report, women are on average 14% less likely to own a mobile phone than men, which translates to 200 million fewer women than men owning mobile phones
According to a data and statistics portal called Statista, only 38% women have access to the Internet in urban India (as of 2015). This figure drops drastically to 12% in rural India. Then we constantly read news stories about a certain panchayat or religious group banning the use of mobile phones or computer education for women.
There are about 2,50,000 panchayats in India encompassing some 6,50,000 villages and almost all of them are not connected to the Internet. Neither are majority of 1.4 million government schools, 7-10 million teachers and several millions of children.
There are millions of people who are denied of their rights and entitlements because of a corrupt administrative, financial and governance system. Their illiteracy, lack of information and inability to question the authorities become their biggest enemies. In such as a scenario, knowledge of the computers and access to the Internet could help these people come out of information darkness and access their rights, without the role of a middleman.
We have 2,50,000 panchyats in India. We have more than 1.4 million government schools in India. We have about 8,60,000 front-line health workers spread across rural India. We have 1.8 million anganwadi workers deputed at village and hamlet level. Why can’t we train all of them in digital literacy and bring all of them online? Instead of providing digital literacy training to 6 crore randomly selected individuals under the National Digital Literacy Mission, why not implemented a more targeted approach; and watch its cascading effect?
Under the government’s ambitious National Optic Fibre Network or NOFN (which was renamed BharatNet in 2015), a mammoth budget of Rs. 70,000 crore has been allocated to connect all the panchayats of India to the Internet. While the government claims to have reached 61,000 gram panchayats (out of a total of 2,50,000), only 7,000 of them have a working network. And at most of these 7,000-odd panchayats, there are almost no users or usage of the Internet.
And now there is a new problem for the 70% of India’s population that lives in rural areas. Demonitisation. The government is asking its citizens to use e-Wallets and make e-Payment; but does the government understand that an e-wallet means nothing unless one has an Internet-enabled mobile phone, a functional bank account and a credit or debit card. Paytm, Freecharge, Bhim are are all inaccessible if there is no working Internet connection for the consumer. So the problem is not of digital literacy alone but of infrastructure to support a digital economy and a Digital India as well.
Is the government aware that in a country with a population of more than 1.2 billion, there are only about 24.51 million credit cards and 661.8 million debit cards in circulation; and not all of them are actively used. Even the number of ATMs is restricted to a little more than 200,000. As many as 75,000 of these are located in semi-urban and rural areas. According to a report by the Internet Society, 50% of Internet-enabled mobile phone users in South Asia don’t even access the Internet on their phones. And a large share of Internet-using semi-urban and rural population is restricted to the use of social media.
DEF is, thus, dedicated to reducing this gap between those digitally enabled and those that aren’t digitally enabled since 2002. Over the years, it has established more than 170 Community Information Resource Centres (CIRCs) across 22 states of India where it provides digital literacy training to individuals and groups of all age groups. Through its Wireless for Communities project, DEF uses low-cost equipment and unlicensed spectrum to bring network connectivity to regions have no means to connect to the Internet because private players don’t see any profit in reaching out to these regions.
A version of this blog was first published in NDTV: Every Life Counts on January 6, 2016.