What’s the meaning of Digital Exclusion. Unfortunately India and its larger mass is more digitally excluded than included. Let’s try to understand by live examples from past and present.

This article below is from November 2016. For Indians, this month and year is not easily forgettable. With stated aims of curbing 'black money,' and controlling the informal economy, the government had decided to demonetise the highest two denominations of currency, leading to chaos, long queues, confusion, and even hunger and deaths.

The below two articles are from earlier in the year of 2016, but the first was arguably the most traumatic incident in recent memory. It remains relevant because the next to pieces talk about the state of exclusion and the rising costs of living that came along with it. What was the cost of the internet, or accessing the digital services at the time the government pushed for digitisation of the economy? To fill a form that would enable a poor or marginalised student to get basic benefits of welfare schemes, they needed to spend around Rs 70 (including travel to the digital center that provides access, as well as the costs to pay there). This would be close to half a day's wage. Imagine how in this year the people would have struggled to get their notes re-valued and replaced?

This is an article from even earlier in the year - of how Nichlagarh near Mount Abu, Rajasthan has transformed into a vilalge of connectivity. This is however one out of 650,000 villages in the country at the time.

And now, even as per a report from last year, 25,000 of that 650,000 are still wothout connectivity.

Over 25,000 villages lack mobile connectivity, govt data shows

Out of 5,97,618 inhabited villages in the country, 25,067 villages lack mobile connectivity and Internet, according to the Ministry of Communications reply in the Lok Sabha based on Telecom Service Providers (TSP) data.

businesstoday.in

Odisha has 6,099 villages, highest in the country, without mobile connectivity. Arunachal Pradesh has 2,223 villages, Madhya Pradesh has 2,612, and Maharashtra has 2,328. Andhra Pradesh has 1,787 villages without Internet and Jharkhand has 1,144 such villages.Kerala, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, and Haryana are some of the few states which have achieved the highest penetration of mobile services in their villages.

We have gone a long way, but clearly the disaster then was a considerable lack of foresight.

However, here in this article we write about how our CIRC-implemented training has not only connected the community in this drought-affected village in Latur, Maharashtra, but how they have gone beyond to use GIS apps to map the areas worst affected, bore-well locations, communicate about safety of supplied water, and share these recommendations with the larger community.

This piece, also from 2016, a few days before demonetisation, talks about how the banks were already not being held to account for the charges they were levying. It is acknowledged that there was a divide in banking inclusion - how several chunks of rural india neither had access nor trust in formal banking. Even as the NDA I government vowed to bring more people into the fold, they adopted methods that were subtly coercive - welfare benefits now arrived via direct bank transfer, which smoothened out the process, closed several gaps and leaks, but also forced several people to open bank accounts. Just that they came with hidden costs that were beyond their means. One example the piece talks about is of the bank deducting almost 2-3 days of a person's wage as he tried to get his rightful NREGA money, with little to no grievance mechanisms.

Things had not changed three years after the report either, as this Hindu News article says:

If the money we are depositing in the accounts is being spent on paying charges applied by banks, then the whole purpose of the scheme is defeated. The beneficiaries of this scheme come from economically backward classes and it is difficult for them to pay bank charges.

How a DBT scheme broke under the weight of bank charges

Drain on the money paid to students’ accounts directly

thehindu.com

Another article from the year reminds us that the rural, barely connected population were trying all possible ways to gain access, and we have seen how refurbished devices are both serving this need and ending up as one less piece of silicon in the e-waste-bin.

From this 2016 piece on how we incorporate the digital into the ration system to ensure things run smoothly -

in the pandemic that was almost mid-way between that article and today, we realised that it neither happened smoothly nor did it help with reducing exclusions. What forced digitisation of the PDS did was exclude more people and exacerbate the existing issues -

Control and delete: Lack of data updating has left millions of poor Indians hungry; here is how

This was first published in the 16-31 January, 2023 print edition of Down To Earth As one travels through the rural areas of Palamu, Chatra, Khunti and Ranchi,

downtoearth.org.in

The same was talked about in this 2017 piece-

The same concern of excluded remaining excluded despite and over the digitisation efforts are echoed in this article a year later from the previous one-

DEF Publications

In this article, DEF's researcher Dhiraj Singha writes on AI and the caste-biased training data that the GenAI LLMs reproduce in their generations.

Here, we take a look into what meaningful connectivity means for the PwD community:

Clicking through barriers, empowering persons with disabilities

There are critical challenges and unique vulnerabilities faced by Persons with disabilities in the digital age

thehindu.com

If you had read the Death by Data piece from LiveMint dating nine years back, take a look at our recently written update with the same title-

Death by data: The human cost of digital governance

In a small village in India, where fields stretch endlessly and homes are built with mud and hope, lived a girl named Ruhi. She was five years old, full of misc

thenewsminute.com

By integrating digital technologies, open-access systems, and frugal methodologies, we can create self-reliant, intelligent rural ecosystems that not only enhance the quality of life for millions of people but also contribute to a more sustainable and diversified model of development.

Does the Number of ICT Users Indicate Digital Adoption?

We must envision a digital-by-design framework that is built on a citizen-centric, rather than a consumer-centric model.

owsa.in

And this piece from our research on Just Transition study on coal-mining areas in Jharkhand:

Just Transition for Coal Miners – A Researchers’ Perspective

A potential coal phase-down would devastate workers, and could possibly lead to unemployment and increased crime in the region.

owsa.in

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