Digital Divide in India

The term digital divide describes the discrepancy between people who have access to and the resources to use new information and communication tools, such as the Internet, and people who do not have the resources and access to the technology. The term also describes the discrepancy between those who have the skills, knowledge and abilities to use the technologies and those who do not.

The digital divide can exist between those living in rural areas and those living in urban areas, between the educated and uneducated, between economic classes, and on a global scale between more and less industrially developed nations.

Determinants of Digital Divide in India

As India is a multicultural, multi-language and multi-religion country with complex socio-economic conditions, there are six main difficulties in serving rural communities, each one of which has appeared insurmountable: poverty, unemployment, age and education.

• There is huge gap of digital divide between rural and urban India where growth is biased in favour of urban areas; according to statistics, more than 75 per cent of the broadband connections in the country are in the top 30 cities
• Some States are not able to adopt even one technology but others have adopted very efficiently.
• It is not just about people who have access and those that do not; it is not just about haves and have-nots especially those who can communicate with the rest of the world and those that cannot.
• Another important reason of digital divide in India is knowledge divide. Knowledge  divide is directly related with digital divide.
• Internet use is primarily associated with a large section of the English-knowing urban population.
• Added to these, the growing population, insufficient funds, affordability, and delays in implementation of government policies and programmes have been some of the challenges that have led to unequal development in the society, which is responsible for digital divide.

Challenges and Barriers to Bridging the Digital Divide

• Infrastructural barriers: India still lacks a robust telecommunication infrastructure with sufficient reliable bandwidth for Internet connection
• Literacy and skill barriers: Education in information literacy will play an important role in keeping the society from fragmenting into a population of information haves and have–nots. The lack of skill in using computer and communication technology also prevents people from accessing digital information.
• Economic barriers: Poor access to computer and communication technology also causes a digital divide. In India the ability to purchase or rent the tool for access to digital information is less among the masses.
• Content barriers: To solve the digital divide, steps should be taken by the government to ensure that all citizens are able to receive diverse content relevant to their lives as well as to produce their own content for their communities and for the Internet.

• Language barriers: Having a multicultural and multilingual population, today a large percentage of information content on the Internet is in English, which is a barrier for the people whose primary language is not English.

Forced to pay double: A case

• Passport applicants belong to weaker sections of society substantially, where computer illiteracy puts them on the wrong side of the digital divide, they are forced to pay almost double the amount that a computer literate applicant would pay to apply for a passport because they have to rely on cyber cafes and they need computers to apply.

Policy/Programmes for Addressing the Challenges in Bridging the Digital Divide

• India taking significant steps towards acquiring competence in information and technology, the country is increasingly getting divided between people who have access to technology and those who do not.
• The Indian government has passed Information Technology Act, 2000 to make to e-commerce and e-governance a success story in India along with national e-governance plan.
• Steps are being taken to fulfil Universal Service Obligation (USO), funding, and administration.
• The government allowed Mobile number portability (MNP) which enables mobile telephone users to retain their mobile telephone numbers when changing from one mobile network operator to another.
• National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN), a project aimed to ensure broadband connectivity to over two lakh (200,000) gram panchayats of India by 2016

State Government Services

• Sourkaryan and E–Seva: Project of the government of Andhra Pradesh is now operational in the port city of Visakhapatnam, provides the facility for a citizen to pay property taxes online and also view details of plans and projects of the government and local bodies.
• The Bhoomi Project of Karnataka state covers 6.7 million farmers and holds millions of records of land ownership. The project has earned the goodwill of many people and also international funding agencies.
• The Gyandoot Project: is the first ever project in India for a rural information network in the Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh which has the highest percentage of tribes and dense forest. Every village has a computer centre or “soochnalayas” at prominent market places or major roads. People can easily log in and complain or request information on crops, forest fields, water resources, etc. of the district.

Training

• Role of community information centres: The central and state governments of India, especially the Ministry of Information Technology, have taken a step known as rural electronic libraries. The project has been started in Sikkim and North Eastern states of India to provide IT facility in each and every block. Each CIC will have one server computer system and five client configuration computer systems linked in a local area network and connected to a V–SAT for Internet access.
• Microsoft’s community technology skills programme, which was launched in 2004 in India and 2005 in Chennai, focuses on providing access to technology and employment. Their new programme ‘Youth Spark’, which will focus on holistic education and developing entrepreneurship skills
• National Science Digital Library (NSDL): The National Science Digital Library Project was conceived by the government to provide cheaper access to science and technology books to students. NSDL is a facility planned to provide focused content to undergraduate and higher–level students.
• Digital Mobile Library:
  • In order to bridge the digital divide in a larger way the government of India, in collaboration with the Centre for Advanced Computing (C–DAC) based in Pune.
  • It aims to bring about one million digital books to the doorsteps of common citizens. The Internet–enabled digital library will promote literacy.
  • It will make use of a mobile van with satellite Internet connections. The van will be fitted with printers, scanners, cutters and binding machines for providing books in bound form to end users.
• Unnati Project
• Unnati, is a project of the Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL) which strives to bridge the digital divide in schools by giving the rural students with poor economic and social background an access to computer education
• The project provides for supply of five computers for each school. The HPCL will draft the services of the National Institute of Technology (NIT) for imparting training to the students and even the teachers in computer operation.

Role of academic and research institutions

• IIT Karagpur designed a project to “bridge the communication gap between the sightless and the sighted.” The project has enabled the blind to surf the Internet, read text in Indian languages and even take up normal office work. A software IIT Webel has been developed to translate Braille into plain English.
• Telemedicine system must be expanded and designed to be more user–friendly and economical. What is needed is to bring awareness among people about telemedicine and telehealth and their advantages.
• The Azim Premji Foundation has been involved with universalization of elementary education by creating effective and scaleable models to improve the quality of learning in school.
• Tata Council of Community Initiatives, are playing an important role in promoting adult education in the country. The council has extended several innovative computer–based literacy programs to improve India’s adult education by preparing multimedia presentations.

The unequal access to information and communication technologies has led to the digital divide though India has made encouraging efforts to bridge the gap by initiating a number of projects and programmes for rural and remote locations, a strong determination among people, good policy–makers and political support is also required to bridge the digital divide. The country needs to improve the infrastructure of public libraries and link them with community information centres.