Keywords

1 Introduction

On 22 January 2020, a twenty-year-old woman, Chumki Khatun, was cornered by a largely female mob in a village called Gourbazar in Birbhum district in the Indian state of West Bengal. It demanded to know why she had been photographing the village women and collecting data from their ‘Aadhar’ (a national identification) card or voter cards. The confronted young woman was unable provide a satisfactory explanation. Although timely intervention from the local police ushered her to safety, Khatun’s house was vandalised. This was prompted by a collective charge from the village community against her being an agent for the National Register of Citizens (NRC).Footnote 1

What Khatun had failed to convincingly articulate to her antagonized audience, however, was that her business in Gourbazar was in no way connected to the Indian government’s passage of the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAA) (Gettleman & Raj, 2019), which favored all religions in South Asia except Islam as a criterion for determining if illegal migrants in India could potentially become citizens. Aligned with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) election promise of a Hindu nation (Chaudhary & Marlow, 2019), following the CAA, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led BJP government also pushed forward the NRC to identify illegal migrants to India, (Tiwary & Dastidar, 2019). Far from being a government agent, she was a ground-level digital literacy trainer, one of several thousand that were part of a programme-initiative launched in July 2015 in India. The concept for this programme was generated and funded at a pan-Indian level through collaboration between Tata Trusts, a key philanthropic body in India, and Google, with seed support from India’s Intel Corporation. The initiative partnered with grassroot-level NGOs and local governments, who were the interface with those like Khatun, for its implementation. This programme, Internet-Saathi, was envisioned to enable “women in rural areas to use the Internet and benefit from it” with hope that the initiative would “bridge the technology gender divide” in India (Menon, 2015). In this regard, the term Saathi – meaning ‘companion’ or ‘aide’ – itself is evocative.

While Khatun’s instance is extreme, when juxtaposed with the intended vision of the programme, it is a provocation nonetheless to interrogate how women in rural India, digitally literate or otherwise, manoeuvre being aberrations when they occupy and operate in a public sphere or space. By tracing individual experiences of a specific group of Internet-Saathis with the programme during and beyond its deployment, this is the imperative that we pursue, analyse, and explicate in the present article. In our study, this group comprised eighteen women in Purulia, a district in West Bengal itself, a little over 100 km away from where Khatun was confronted in Gourbazar. As its point of departure, rather than a macro-view, our study and its findings are based on insights gained from the more granular, subjective, and reflective narrations of these individuals. Purulia, a largely rural district, was also the Internet-Saathi programme’s flagship site in West Bengal, commencing in June 2016 (Paul et al., 2017, p. 152) and concluding in mid-2019. Viewed this way in a continuum, rather than ‘before-after’ stable states, deeper insights are gained into the nature of these women’s engagements, the challenges they individually or collectively faced with learning about or using the internet, what they do with it, and also what they cannot or do not. This provides the opportunity to move productively beyond polarizing views of whether the programme was a success or failure, but closely follow what the contours and implications of gaining access to the internet and its presence in everyday lives of these women are and how/if they were translated into meaningful connectivity (A4AI, 2020). In examining their manoeuvres as women in rural India, we demonstrate that – in varied ways – societal and cultural confines in their specific as well as combined lives are as constant ‘companions’ to them as their access to the internet or digital literacy are. These two aspects of technologies and society, we argue, co-exist in uneasy, and unexpected, ways in lives of the Internet-Saathis.

2 Intellectual Context, Conceptual Framing, and Approach

Contradicting a one-size-fits-all approach to solving social problems, Robin Mansell (2012) has queried by whom and for whom technological innovations are actually being structured. In the age of Manuell Castells’ informationalism, where global capitalism enlarges its playing field to spread ICTs, it is important to ask if every community or group has the capacity to take part equally (Van Audenhove, 2003). A cause-effect relationship between ICT diffusion and development is misleading because conditions and complexities of varied contexts or cultures complicate it (Avgerou, 2017). There is a paucity of unified narratives and a knowledge gap on successes of interventions in the context of many developing countries (Sein et al., 2019). This may possibly tie up with how the Internet imaginary is based on an ‘idea’ of an inherently even distribution of networks despite a hierarchical organization in both its material infrastructure and the way users pragmatically reach information. Influential communication scholars such as Van Dijk (2005) have likened this to what sociologists Merton and Zuckerman originally termed “Matthew effect”. Moreover, a recent study explores the extent to which various (non)-users can be subjected to mechanisms of inclusion or exclusion, consisting of eight profiles of digital inequalities, ranging from deep exclusion to deep inclusion (Asmar et al., 2022). In such a reading of ‘accumulated advantage’, gaps between the advantaged and disadvantaged groups persist through social exclusion and stratification, despite ICT intervention.

Preventing women from having a digital life is an extension of the long deprivation of access to public space that women have struggled with for centuries. Turning this around is tantamount to addressing discriminatory institutional and legal policies and cultural norms, which is no small challenge. (Arora, 2019, p. 11).

This provocation by Payal Arora brings to the fore that women form both a cross-cutting as well as subset category within the larger frames: global, regional, national, or even sub-national levels of consideration, in how the ICTs and societies interact. However, it is important to be cautious of approaching the discourse on women in a general sense. Even as a gendered category, women are far from uniform – even when viewed through socio-economic lenses like ‘global south’, regional ones like ‘South Asia’ or geopolitical and national-territorial ones like ‘India’. Other granular studies like Sarkar (2016), Pokpas (2017) demonstrate that several interim stages lie in between the poles of a condition that prevents women from the digital life or unchanged status in society and providing ownership or access as a ‘solution’. It is here that our research seeks insights into the continuum that is at play and weighing the process of how lives are impacted by a ground level initiative in a specific moment and context. Oury study is interested in pursuing what Anita Gurumurthy (2013) terms ‘participatory citizenship’. She defines this as how social and political participation of women can be traced by connecting digital space and public spheres. Elsewhere, she critiques the ICTs failure to be ‘productively disruptive’ in women’s favour in general and more so in rural areas (Gurumurthy & Chami, 2018).

We frame our investigation through three interrelated concepts. The first is the Capability Approach (CA) that Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum developed in welfare economics in the 1980s. Its compatibility with our inquiry is in privileging the role of self-education as a facilitator of development and not mere propagation of technologies (Van Audenhove, 2003). It also draws a useful philosophical distinction between means and ends. In the sphere of the ICTs and societies, many studies over the years have used CA to map contributions to development (Hatakka & De’, 2011; Kleine, 2011; Thapa & Sæbø, 2014). By focusing on social dimensions, CA frames development as a route to enhancing people’s freedoms, within their socio- economic arrangements, political and civil rights (Sen, 1999). Building upon the CA, moving beyond the utilitarian roles of technology, Yingqin Zheng and Bernd Carsten Stahl (2011) argue that the ICTs co-evolve with values and choice, and technology may influence people’s agency in choosing and attaining its functional capacities meaningfully. In this case, within such a Choice Framework (CF) individuals use their agency to navigate the ICTs’ structures to be in a position of making choices. According to Kleine (2009), choice can be multidimensional (degrees of empowerment): it should also exist (existence of choice); individuals need to be aware of it (sense of choice); they have to be able to exercise it (use of choice); and then its effectiveness may or may not materialise (achievement of choice). The existence and sense of choice is a lens through which capabilities in personal, societal, cultural, or political lives can be interpreted. In such a way, the CF supports a holistic view of ‘capabilities’ via Sen through its core ideas.

Our focus on rural women in a particular region in Bengal potentially facilitates a deeper understanding of their structural and functional capabilities and choices, and the role of ICTs in them. Here, we combine the CA/CF framework with a socio-psychological concept, “mattering”. Mattering is embedded in theories of agency and empowerment, and when used to frame the ICTs in a development domain. It brings sharper focus on how “others depend on us, are interested in us, are concerned with our fate, or experience us…” (Rosenberg & McCullough, 1981, p. 165).

Mattering in social psychology literature refers to three dimensions: awareness, importance, and reliance. Awareness refers to the “merest of senses if others realize that we exist”, importance is “extent to which people are the object of others’ interest and concern” whereas reliance entails “the extent to which others depend on someone” (Elliott et al., 2004, p. 340). It is an important part of an individual’s self-concept and their sense of where they fit in their social environment. For those in marginalised societies, and especially women, an individuals’ self-concept may comprise the sense of her relevance to others around her, a judgment regarding the extent to which his or her advice is valued and, an assessment of how much concern others have for them (Chew et al. 2015). The experience of having a say in who they are and a sense of what they do matters may lead to a greater motivation to take risks, to innovate, and to be meaningfully ‘empowered’. In this manner, our study – even in focussing on a narrow group – illuminates the more general cognitive aspects of agency and capability. Examining this in the empirical context of our study, we take cognisance of the complex, non-linear relationship between social and digital entitlements.

Proceeding with this conceptual approach, our study was configured through an analytical framework that took into account these myriad dimensions of capabilities, choices and mattering. In order to foreground, in a bottom-up manner, the voices of the participants in informing these interrelated aspects, the framework was developed to privilege the experiences of the Internet-Saathis themselves through the following components:

  • Existing barriers and starting capacity: The ICTs benefits argued in favour of a trickle-down approach are interrogated through extant societal structures negotiated by individuals. Given that these benefits are moderated by social approval education and prior conditions, the category of ‘women’ itself emerges as non-uniform.

  • Digital literacy experience: Given the premise of how ICT interventions being deployed top-down having limitations, it was important to understand the ways in which the ‘technological solution’ of a digital literacy programme was being utilised by individuals in their learning and teaching experiences.

  • Notions of ‘value’, as conceived, perceived and lived: The individual-specific ‘datum’ (or starting capacity) will position how value addition has occurred through the ICT intervention. This became crucial in assessing improved capabilities and capacity for exercising choice.

  • ‘Mattering’ to self and to others: This aspect pursued insights on complex negotiations needed between practical and strategic interests, the ability to influence peers, or even the community in general, as visible through activities of the Internet-Saathis. This allows querying to what extent beneficiaries of the ICT interventions in the digital-literacy programme are publicly vocal about their concerns and consciousness.

3 Context of the Programme, Empirical Study and Method

The term Internet-Saathi has two valences. It is a programme as well as an individual agent embodied in the figure of the rural Indian woman. Here, it is pertinent to mention that the programme was modelled on a train-the-trainer model. In addition to using the ‘hook’ word, Saathi (companion), it also reverted to an image that is easily associated with rural India, the bicycle. The bicycle given to an Internet-Saathi – here, the woman, was not an ordinary one. It was endowed with a cart with all the necessary paraphernalia for its rider to access the internet for utility or entertainment – a tablet device and two smart phones supported by a mobile internet hub. This rider would make the rounds of public areas in a set of villages assigned to her at least twice a week for a period of four to six months. The intent was to induce other women into the digital sphere through her own and the women’s hands-on experience of using the internet through these devices. Based on this, our study has viewed individual Internet-Saathis as both recipients and agents of digital literacy.

In studying such and similar initiatives through a gendered lens, Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami (2018) present a rare study that looks at these claims in a critical manner. Although they do not undertake an in-depth or focussed study of the programme itself, their report is sceptical. It states that the: “Internet Saathi digital literacy initiative for rural women, partnering with state governments to empower women and their enterprises through use of modern technologies” has a rhetorical bent towards “digital by default”. In their view, such an initiative “largely ignores and even undermines marginalised women’s rights to life, livelihood, privacy and dignity” (p.60).

Such doubts assume significance when juxtaposed with the countrywide narratives how rural women developed “better understanding” of the internet, “positive economic impact” on them or even their “improvement in social standing”. This is where the particularities of their personal and lived experiences with this initiative gain currency, as does our study, as arguably being an early examination that inverts the perspective. Rather than view the programme through its high-profile proponents and organisations, we have attempted to understand the initiative through actual narratives of its stated beneficiaries in the context of Purulia, not in statistical or quantitative terms, but through their individual and subjective experiences.

Here, our study was deployed based on a set of robust working-hypotheses that supplied the apparatus to frame more precise questions for the selected participants. The 17 participants who formed the ‘unit of analysis’ were selected through the lens of Centre for Environmental and Socio-economic Regeneration (CESR), a local NGO in Bengal who were Google’s implementation partner for the Internet Saathi program.

The 17 interviews were semi-structured, conducted between March, 2020 and May 2020, in order to capture the individual subjectivities of the respondents and also find comparable and contrasting patterns. The transcripts, based on the questions, and also the free-play of conversations yielded, but were not limited to, five interrelated types of information: background, experiential, actions, reflections and anecdotes. In the context of Purulia, where the programme was deployed, the participants in the study represent fifteen settlements (or hamlets) under the administration of ten discrete ‘Gram’ or village level Panchayats, the lowest executive and spatial level of governance in India (see Fig. 11.1). These village panchayats are distributed in varied areas ensuring representation of various different zones within the district (Census of India, 2011). The names of participants vide ethical frameworks and considerations have been changed in this presentation. However, other various aspects: age, educational level, marital status, having children or not, and present occupation were considered relevant to analyse the findings (see Table 11.1).

Fig. 11.1
A map of India highlights the state of West Bengal, and an enlarged map of the state, with the district of Purulia highlighted. A map of Purulia indicates Raghanathpur and Purulia municipality, and marks district, block, and gram panchayat boundaries. A table has data on the study location.

Study location

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Table 11.1 Overview of personal profiles and present circumstances of participants in the study
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This range of information helped to firstly, understand the participants’ family conditions, educational levels, marital status, or children, as well as occupations. Experiences, further, clarified the difficulties or ease of engagement with the internet in general on the one hand, while also allowing narrations of barriers at the levels of family or immediate community, on the other. It also revealed their experiences of self-learning and/or their ability to induce others’ interest to learn and engage with the ICTs. Additionally, the Saathis’ narrations on actions and their reflections, since the programme had ended in Purulia, was crucial in learning how and to what extent they operationalised the knowledge of ICTs in both personal and wider communal or societal terms. These also revealed their perceptions of value addition to their own lives, as well as the potential to transfer this value to the community, if they were aware of entitlements and responsibilities, conscious about a public self, or even discerned between true or untrue received information over the internet. And finally, most participants were able to articulate reflections and their reflexive knowledge more clearly through actual incidents or happenings rather than in abstract or conceptual terms, which is why the interviews also privileged anecdotes. These text-based interview transcripts and their resulting findings were coded, codes were categorised and analysed to enable a clear comprehension and, subsequently, interpretation of the responses by evaluating them within the aspects of both domestic and public transformations in the participants’ lives.

4 Tracing Digital Literacy: Goal or Means

The findings and observations from these transcripts significantly recovered experiences and reflections of the Internet-Saathi participants that contributed to this study. By privileging and enlarging the process of change in a continuum, rather than attempt to establish a stable state, we present these aggregated experiences and correlate the findings and their sub-components to each of the four dimensions of the analytical framework. The co-relationships and dependencies have been thought through, rather than a linear cause and effect, a matrix of correlations as represented in Fig. 11.2 below. On the whole, processing the findings move from the ‘what happened’ aspect to the ‘why it happened this way’ aspect. For instance: why do the participants feel that acquisition of digital literacy contributes to an enhancement of not only their economic opportunities, but also accords them increased social capital? Conversely – even with the agency to participate in digital platforms – why do they not comment or engage in public discussion online with political issues that concern their social existence? These finer issues, when closely read through the nuances and spaces between the participants’ reported responses, yielded dimensions which can be built outward from the individual to social levels and to explain the contradictions and still-existing barriers in this continuum where digital literacy is variably a goal, as well as a means.

Fig. 11.2
A block diagram has findings, including encountering program, direct political participation, and discernment. Thinking through analytical framework has 4 factors, connecting with 6 elements. It leads to evaluating the working hypotheses through findings, to answering the research questions.

Study co-relationships and dependencies

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4.1 Knowledge Appetite as Capability

The most consistent refrain across all the participants was their attributing unequivocal importance to the internet as a means to expand their individual life-worlds. This, as evident through their testimonies, was not about a mere utility of gathering data or information alone, but a pronounced ‘knowledge appetite’. This was the recurring aspect to which they attributed value, at a personal and an existential level, as reflected even in the varied responses of the internet’s indispensability to daily life and lived experience. Every participant found it difficult to ignore that now that they knew more, still more could be known. Having a phone with access to the internet, this value could potentially be taken advantage of, flexibly. In these women’s lives, such flexibility was paramount since it meant that their engagement with online activity could operate within ‘offline’ constraints of housework, even occupation or studies. By all participants, this feeling was conveyed – primarily – to be a personal one, that as following discussions will explain, expanded outwards to become social.

While to some women, this manifested in the form of having access to personal entertainment without owning an expensive television set or satellite / cable connections, to others it was accorded value by being able to access variations in the things they already did, like cooking, sewing or even handicrafts. For some, it promised the potential of checking up or verifying study-related or vocational information, including searching for jobs and eliminating dependencies on middlemen. For others still, it was possible to visually experience places that they could not afford to physically travel to. As much as the distant and inaccessible, the internet’s multi-scalar nature could also provide access, as some participants reported, to information about the local context. This was best encapsulated in how Anila related, rather plainly, about how she installed the ‘Public’ app on her phone that gave her the most updated information on her own district from what she thought were reliable sources.

4.2 Socio-economic Independence as Capability

Despite variations among the participants’ own backgrounds, a recurring narrative was on the high degree of value all participants placed on being independent in socio-economic terms. It is true that several of the women who were trained as Saathis carved out opportunities for themselves in myriad ways through access to online information and knowledge. This ranged from micro-level activities such as professionally making, packaging, and selling food items, clothes or accessories in the immediate and wider neighbourhood, or looking for job opportunities and paying for utilities online, to even in one case, enhancing future aspirations as a politician. However, it is important to be cautious of inferring hastily that this is an isolated phenomenon related to creating livelihood or income opportunities alone.

Here, it is important to recall that in the Saathis’ experiences, regardless of their backgrounds, the job entailed not only self-learning but also training others. So – by default – for those who had barely left home for work previously, the work as an Internet Saathi was not one that could be carried out in isolation. By its very nature, it necessarily brought these women into contact with other people who were by and large strangers to them. Therefore, for those who had been confined to households previously, exited their homes and entered an employed and wage-earning labour circuit. Simultaneously, they were also compelled to operate in a public sphere. As reported by all Saathis, the work required a substantial degree of convincing others who displayed considerable scepticism on the merit of ‘allowing’ other women initiation into and engagement with the internet. These sceptics ranged from entire communities, elder male members, fathers or husbands, and the potential women students themselves.

As a result, firstly, the work as an Internet-Saathi needed a certain degree of self-conviction and confidence to work outdoors in unknown physical and social spaces. In this regard, the Saathis’ collective experience created a level playing field irrespective of having had prior exposure to computers (which they reported to have forgotten), those finding it difficult or, even those being at ease with mobile-internet and smartphones during their initiation as Saathis. As one such woman who was completely comfortable with smartphones even before being an Internet Saathi, Padmini, asserted, “What I learnt there was training methods: how to actually go on the field, talk to people and teach them new things. That part of the training was very helpful...”

Secondly, and significantly, this points to an important subversion of the assumption that digital literacy is a ‘goal’ in ensuring access to such a programme. The experiences narrated by its participants transcended such stated aims, even those on the mere creation of livelihood. As evident, the Saathis testified that the value of personal development was deeper. Through imbibing soft skills, or activation of a ‘public’ self, this was at par with, if not being more valuable than, acquiring livelihoods and digital literacy alone. It manifested in perception of their enhanced position and confidence in the public sphere. Given that they were carrying out this job even at an anticipated – and as Khatun’s experience demonstrated, real – risk to personal safety, many Saathis were overcoming the very fear and insecurity that characterised a feeble confidence level at their starting capacities. Through these multiple and interrelated dimensions, then, they were placed into the process of acquiring, as well as self-perceiving an enhanced state of capabilities through the programme.

4.3 Sense of Entitlements and Rights as a Sense of Choice

In combination, these aspects co-produced another significant attribute among the participants: a ‘sense’ of choice. The sense of choice developed in varied ways. It is equally important to examine, concurrently, to what degree the participants have ‘used’ their choice, and ‘achieved’ what they consider valuable within the choices they construct through digital literacy. These lateral connections are drawn in the present discussion.

To an extent, it has been unsurprising to note that some of the prime deprivations of the women participants in this study was choice-related, on account of their gender. Rukmini’s was a particularly tragic case. She narrated a series of diverse aspirations that were side-tracked since she was the only girl among her other four siblings. Art, dance, cooking, spoken-English, being a beautician or even sewing were rejected in favour of marrying her off immediately after high school. Comparably, Anila could not occupy a very secure government job in the Central Reserve Police Force, even having been selected for the position. This was on account of her mother’s resistance, since her post of duty was situated 119 kilometres away from her home.

Such occurrences had been normalised in these participants’ lives. But knowledge gleaned from regular internet access was instrumental in activating a sense of deprivation about these retroactively, and conversely, the choices they had not been allowed to make simply on account of their gender. In reflecting upon these pasts, we received a nearly unanimous response on their consciousness or ‘sense’ of how what had happened with them was not acceptable anymore.

Speaking in more instrumental terms, this was the reason why some of the participants were impassioned advocates for female adolescent rights, raising awareness on their sexual and reproductive health and ill-effects of underage marriage. This was consistent across both participants who were married underage themselves and those who had exercised their own choice of continuing their education and pursuing a career over early marriage. But, on the whole, tangible actions were taken by less than half of the total number of participants we spoke with. Conversely, their use of choice barely transferred very successfully into other public spheres. Herein, as evident from the findings discussed in the previous chapter, a stiff contradiction emerges. The sense of choice was usurped by the sense of fear in being overtly vocal in a socio-political public sphere as a woman, whether offline or online.

With the few exceptions such as Mousumi, the practicing politician backed by a family pedigree and Lalita, exercise of female choice was limited to softer measures like advocacy and counselling. Anila was a key exception but still falling short of satisfying the use and achievement of choice to a substantive degree of freedom. She narrated how she had viewed a post on Facebook where local political representatives claimed that a public water-tap in their village (which incidentally was close to her home) was in immaculate shape. Knowing very well the ground condition; the infestation of the tap with insects and pests, she exposed the lie and doctored photograph by commenting on the post and sharing a real photograph online. However, to do this, she hid behind an anonymous account. Even if Anila’s move was strategic and inventive, her having to veil her identity despite her educational background or sense of exercising an instrumental choice and voice to speak out suggested that, she lacked confidence and security about acting upon and achieving this choice as an identifiable woman.

4.4 Enhancement of Social Capital as ‘Mattering’

It is pertinent to view the analyses of the aforesaid three crucial and interrelated dimensions, as both emerging from and converging on an aspect of ‘mattering’. This occurs in independent as well as relative terms among ‘others’ in their community, while also projecting outwards to specifically include members of their own gender in the public sphere.

Such mattering is, firstly, an internal perception. Equally, it is mediated between self-esteem and well-being through family, friends and acquaintances. With perceived values added through knowledge of the internet, even if limited, high self-esteem reported by our respondents meant they felt more confident in relating to these groups. They were more likely to feel valued by them, believing they could positively contribute to such relationships. An enhanced sense of mattering was also induced when other women from the community came and asked for help from them. This occurred, for instance, when girls who looked up to them asked for advice on how to lead a similar life. It, thus, derived from self-perceptions of being important for others, on the one hand. On the other, it spanned the spectrum of people or groups that were more powerful (seniors, elders and mentors) as well as less powerful (proteges, emulators) than the individual concerned.

The findings also reflect that a stronger sense of self appeared among these women, after receiving such forms of social validation from their friends and family. A link where collective informed individual identity formation was observed. For instance, Lalita’s mother-in-law defending her for riding a scooter or wearing what she pleased was informed a realisation of her sense-of-self. The interrelated problems of self-recognition and recognition by others were central aspects of these women’s processes in an enhanced identity formation.

All the Saathis also reported to feeling freer and more important than before. This sense of change was observed in every single respondent when their starting capacity was adjudged against reflections on how they felt presently, in other words, before and after going through the process of enacting the job of Internet Saathis. The change in both perception and utility as Saathis was not limited to the domestic sphere. It altered their engagement with the public sphere as well as being self-dependent, economically and socially. Such a practice of the new found ‘digital’ agency in the public sphere allowed them to navigate certain male-dominated domains in both utilitarian ways, not just for themselves but also the community they were in.

‘Mattering’, in this sense, is closely related to the value the participants derived from an enhancement of ‘social capital’ within the community. This is the ‘sphere of influence’ that their identities, capacities as well as choices exerted on others. Such social capital was, therefore, portable and scalable across their structures of engagement. When thought through a process in the continuum of developing political consciousness, this has occurred through their actions as trainers, in managing to successfully convince unknown groups or individuals to undertake the training, at one level. At another level, such successes – even if limited – reflexively fed back into their ‘reputations’ as carriers of certain knowledge that rendered them exclusive in the community at large. In instrumental terms, therefore, these two dimensions of political consciousness are also interconnected and co-dependent, drawing nourishment from enhancements in the Saathis’ knowledge, capabilities, confidence, socio-economic independence as well as a certain sense of and power to exercise their choices.

4.5 The Glass Ceiling: Persistence of Barriers and Contradictions

It is paramount, at this juncture, to foreground – in being faithful to the study’s focus on process – the extent to which these Internet Saathis think through, project and exercise their internal capacities (knowledge) capabilities (agency to act), choices (rights and entitlements) as well as sense of mattering grounded in social capital. Deeper and incisive reflection on such issues reveals that there is a ‘glass ceiling’ which perceived, reported, imagined virtues are unable to breach. It is constituted by a sliding scale of barriers and constraints, and even entitlements.

Firstly, the recurring cost and attendant network strength was one of the most consistently reported issues across the participants’ experiences. However, it would be reductive to view this as purely a technical issue. In being able to achieve capacities that enable them to effectively use the internet, whether for gaining knowledge, utilities or even where any social capacity can be exercised effectively beyond the time when they were being subsidised by the programme, the Saathis’ own income proved to be a major barrier. At another level, the geographical constraints that determine the network strength also came in the way. This leads to a peculiar chicken or egg problem, where even if the programme helped to ‘incubate’ these women as entrepreneurs, the sustained use of digital literacy, even in its limited form, was dependent on external infrastructure. This is complicated by what the GSMA (2018) has called ‘application islands’ where certain subsidised applications or built-in capacities of devices pose a barrier to exploring the full potential of what is online. In this case, capacities of the devices, free for use of certain applications, will encounter a ‘pay wall’ condition for treading beyond familiar territory, even if theoretically known by the user.

Beyond this, moreover, social issues resurfaced. These are, in a relative sense, a lot less negotiable than the individual or even technical ones. Despite the perceived enhancement of agency by the Saathis through their digital literacy experience, we asked how women navigated their enhanced capacities to map priorities in their households. While most respondents reported that men primarily used internet-enabled devices for non-utilitarian purposes, almost consistently, they said that the men in their families, wherever applicable, had the first ‘right’ to time on a phone, its data. The residues went to the women, who still were largely inextricable from their household duties and spaces. Oddly, this recalls other historical forms of patriarchy in technology, for instance, when television sets arrived in India, the men in a household decided when and what to watch.

In turning to the gendered engagement with a political space, these social issues translated in both offline and online terms. The recurring issue was a disdain and disinterest in politics altogether. All fifteen but one, the elected representative in her village panchayat, said politics was a waste of time. The respondents consistently seemed to be more concerned about an immediate solution to their daily survival needs, and in terms of priorities, relegated long-term political and strategic interests to either a form of cynicism or despair, or considered it far-removed from their fields of day-to-day realities of survival and subsistence. In all, despite being digitally literate, this perpetuated the deeply-entrenched notion that it was a woman’s duty to perform all household activities and men would shoulder the public and worldly concerns, which they consistently used to defend a perspective on their passive participation in electoral and party politics.

Such social issues were also compounded by a gendered ‘reputation’ problem, which persisted, irrespective of acquiring digital literacy. Men, these women claimed, were not limited by moral boundaries or social mores when they went online. But consistently, everyone reported that society would not take too long to blame a woman. The rules are different and one misstep by a woman on social media could tarnish her image forever. Adding to this problem was one of safety and security of their own selves as well as families. In this sense, their social capital did not transfer to online spaces. While men could impinge on the freedom of others, irrespective of gender, when voicing opinions or viewpoints, a women’s ‘right’ or ‘entitlement’ to speak out online even against a freedom of pointing out injustice was perceived to be threatening if they were identifiable. This occurred in both soft forms, as harassment and abuse, and in hard forms, if the ones they spoke up against could access their homes or mobility paths.

Lastly, the social and technical boundaries powerfully converged on a cultural issue: that of language and epistemologies. Despite the potential and ostensible freedom to access any content they wished, even in their circumscribed conditions, the women reported that the barrier of language precluded their ‘cognitive’ access to knowledge, especially in cases when their offline education was inadequate to navigate the noise of information that was not generated in the language they were familiar with. Technically, while refining the voice search tools could potentially redress this, the much greater barrier was ignorance to cultural contexts or references through which online discourse was mediated by algorithms privileging a net-savvy majority. Perhaps, this is the reason why a large proportion of our respondents showed inclination to learn English, revealing a prevailing neo-colonial appropriation of the potential intellectual, cultural, structural and cognitive issues that digital literacy fails to address.

5 Conclusion

To conclude, it is pertinent to begin with how, although most participants faced hurdles, equally from family members and the community, they were able to successfully participate in the programme and conduct themselves as Internet-Saathis. However, no correlation was observed between educational background and existing ICT capacities of the participants with how easily they imbibed the self-learning, where in nearly all cases, epistemological issues of language and terminologies posed key problems. Nonetheless, all participants expressed the indispensability of the internet to their daily lives, in varied ways. Such a testimony of indispensability can be expanded through aspects that were valued by the recipients of the training. In a more direct sense, the logistical and practical difficulties – related to physically having to pay for utilities, elimination of middlemen in form-filling or ticketing – were transcended. At one level, this occurred when it came to their own tasks, homes, jobs, or occupational and income opportunities. Especially those from the weaker sections of society expressed a wide range of emotions, when talking about their life before and after the Saathi experience. More importantly, acquiring skills like a limited “spoken” English proficiency, or being able to comprehend worldly affairs, otherwise presumed to be a forte of the men, or using Google maps to navigate and reach faraway places without anyone’s supervision, made these women more confident and independent.

Beyond the personal benefits, however, at another level, the participants attributed greater significance – consequently value – to being able to help the community members with similar tasks, extending their knowledges into the public sphere. Here, they found particular reason to value the soft skills that they had acquired through the programme as trainers, or the ability to operate in unfamiliar and unknown environments by engaging with publics autonomously. In this sense, they perceived an increase in, firstly, social capital, and secondly, in how recognition was accorded to them by their family members, acquaintances as well as, in certain cases, complete strangers. This also improved their sense of self. Furthermore, a small number of participants also, in reflecting upon the choices denied to them previously, extended their enhanced capacities in educating others (especially young women) about rights, choices and entitlements. On the whole, through these aspects, across all participants, the programme had induced a sense of ‘mattering’ of the self and also others in their own gender.

The above results may portray very positive impressions regarding implications of the digital literacy initiative on an individual or collective lives of these rural women. But if closer attention is paid to how their internalisation of it was limited only in instrumental terms, it would be rash to reach such a conclusion. This can be argued by paying minute attention to how, even when such consciousness did exist, it was largely enacted and practiced offline, that too only in their immediate public sphere of the individual concerned, or even when seen as a group. While offline inequalities were somewhat reduced with online intervention, there was also a surge in new forms of inequalities in the online sphere, like social media abuse, harassment and breach of privacy.

The first indicator of this was that while all the participants displayed a greater sense and awareness of their entitlements and choices, barely any were ready to exercise it in challenging established gender roles, outside their homes despite approval from immediate family or in the neighbourhoods. Second, even those active in the public sphere, did not consider their offline social practices ‘political’. The cognition of the political was limited to electoral or party politics and was not internalised into the self. And, third, with the exception of the one practicing politician, none of the participants displayed any inclination for public leadership in a broader sense. Even in the cases they did speak out against injustices, they hid behind anonymity or veiled identities. On the contrary, engaging with day-to-day political discourse was seen with disdain and considered futile. This was even more amplified when such participation had to be enacted online among unknown people.

Such results, in order to answer the question on practice and enactment of a public self, needs to be viewed from an added perspective. Here, we shift vantage from viewing the subject-participants as political establishment continued to remain passive and barely functional. In a continuum of enacting public and political selves, this put them far behind men or even urban counterparts. A notion that the poor had to fend for themselves took precedence. Except for a few in the upwardly mobile sections of society, no one said they were interested in talking or for that matter engaging directly with public affairs that did not concern their immediate well-being. That economic and social security was their only key to an adequate life was overwhelmingly made clear. Furthermore, even in the more private realm of engaging with online information, very few participants displayed a critical ability to discern authenticity of passed on information. It had an inverse proportional relationship with the information being from geographically faraway places, as opposed to more known environments. In this manner, the aspects of mattering did not reach a wider public or political sphere and was geographically and socially confined and delimited by a consciousness of being the ‘lesser’ gender. Moreover, this was complicated, in addition to patchy network strength, by their inability to manage recurring data costs, limited English language proficiency and, most importantly, vulnerability to online harassment and violence.

This study has demonstrated that a fine-grained reading of even a small group can reveal powerful insights on not only the commonalities, but also the diversity and departures of individual experiences. These individual aspects illuminate the collective experience. This, however, is also its important limitation. For instance, the group studied herein, while reflecting the realities of Purulia, does not represent an adequately large sample to draw definitive generalisations across other contexts, even in India. In a more extended project, the methodological approach we have used can be scalable. This has important implications in evaluating digital literacy’s long-term effectiveness. A majority of studies and concerns reflect the problems in delivering the technology. However, a lot less attention is granted to monitoring of what happens in an extended period after a programme has been deployed. This continues to be under-researched and in several developing and rural contexts as the one we have focussed on, can yield valuable insights in how societies and technologies interact in the longer term.