Last month, Poorvi Gupta, an independent journalist visited DEF's centres in Chhattisgarh, talked to Soochnapreneurs (the information entrepreneurs) and other field staff, and wrote a piece on how women are leading the fight against disinformation, online fraud and various cyber crimes and more.

Poorvi's article highlights the challenges of misinformation and lack of digital awareness in deeper rural areas, like how people getting their social media accounts hacked with obscene content in such a setting is different from the same in a city. Where more people know that this is not an uncommon occurrence, the damages are slightly less. But where having a social media account as a woman is already looked down upon, this hack works on people's gendered biases, and as in this case, would have you distanced and ostracised.

DEF's Training helped her and several other women in the community by training them on cybersecurity. But it wasn't just one person. Poorvi's article explores how the digital training also helped marginalised communities - dalit postgraduate women who were not getting fair work were able to move up with these new skills.

[...] she also helps educate other girls in her community in digital literacy. On speaking to several rural women from different regions of Chhattisgarh, it is clear that the number of smartphone users is growing, with approximately 15.3 million internet subscribers in the region, including 7.18 million in rural areas, according to the 2023 government data. And while this is great news, digital literacy and fact-checking skills still pose an imperative gap which both the state and the central government continue to overlook as a challenge. Initiatives like the DEF’s Soochnapreneur are paramount to advance critical digital literacy and fact-checking against misinformation and disinformation in rural and semi-urban areas.

The work done by the Soochanapreneurs are also documented elsewhere.

Misinformation and fake news in my opinion turned out to be more dangerous than the pandemic itself multiple times. For the longest time people didn’t even believe that it was a disease; they would refuse to wear masks.

A video on our efforts:

And the same being covered by news media:

The Humara MIL Kit for the Multiverse of Digital Fallacies is one of our primary tools for Media and Information Literacy. This program helps people understand and evaluate information and media and create credible content. Communities transitioning to the digital space can better understand misinformation, online trolling, stereotypes, prejudices, and other online threats by understanding MIL. The initiative teaches participants how to identify and address digital risks, making the internet safer and more informed.

Common service centers (CSC) were established under the central government's Digital India campaign as digital access points in rural India. These Chhattisgarh CSCs, usually run by men, provide vital public utility services like social welfare, healthcare, financial services, education, and agriculture information. What the Soochnapreneurs offer is a flip on this gendered labour divide - Women run Community Information Resource Centres (CIRCs) with laptops, printers, and other digital tools through Soochnapreneur to provide digital literacy training, access to ICT, and support for local development.

The article details the stories of two such women from Chhattisgarh - there are 35 Soochnapreneurs across three districts of Chhattisgarh, including Raipur, Durg, and Mahasamund, and many more across other socio-economically backward districts of the country.

Other Articles and News we are reading

Most importantly this week, month and year into a systemic target against a population in Gaza, Palestine, the mixture of blockade and cutting off aid has resulted in a starvation situation in the gaza strip, finally prompting the western allies of Israel to react, and the United Nations to condemn the use of starvation.

Amid starvation in Gaza, Sudan, Guterres slams hunger ‘as a weapon of war’

As starvation worsens in war-torn Gaza, UN agencies repeated warnings on Monday that Israel’s decision to support a “one-week scale-up” of aid is far from enough to reverse deadly malnutrition rates in the enclave. 

news.un.org

The person behind India's Aadhaar, in an interview on AI-LLMs:

Why the world should stop obsessing over LLMs

Nandan Nilekani, the mind behind India’s digital revolution, says the future of AI will not be shaped by who builds the bigger model but by small systems designed to resolve real-world problems.

restofworld.org

Not Just Online, In Control: Why Women’s Digital Agency Matters

In the race to close the digital divide, the conversation has long been centered around access. It’s time we ask a more urgent question: who controls their digital experience?

forbes.com

DEF Updates

CNX 2025 is calling for ‘Call for Sessions’ from across Asia-Pacific countries. Apply here

What we are reading….