Giving Compass' Take:

• Bikalp Chamola, Gyanesh Nanore and Sanjiv Phansalkar argue that India's digital inclusion initiative is focused on companies, not users, preventing digital empowerment. 

• How can funders help to guide government programs to ensure that citizens, not companies, are the primary beneficiaries? 

• Learn about the need for digital literacy in order to achieve internet inclusion. 

The Government of India’s ambitious Digital India programme aims to transform India into a digitally empowered society and a knowledge economy. It has three parts to its vision:

  • digital infrastructure as a core utility service to citizens
  • governance and services on demand
  • digital empowerment of citizens.

Digital empowerment starts with access to the digital world. It includes the ability to confidently participate in the digital world, and reaches its desired goal when citizens can voluntarily, proactively, and creatively use the existing knowledge, as well as build on it.

Empowerment is different from inclusion. Inclusion is limited to providing a citizen access to devices and networks that can enable her to get the information and services necessary and appropriate for her. Empowerment, on the other hand, has an essential element of agency; without this, a citizen cannot be called digitally empowered.

If we revisit the vision of Digital India, in particular the first two aspects—digital infrastructure as a core utility service to citizens, and governance and services on demand—it would appear that the project serves the primary role of improving efficiency, reducing misdirection of resources, and improving speed. While entirely desirable, these are values that are external to citizens.

Within this framework, instead of a hapless and powerless citizen trudging the offices of the state, we now find a hapless and uninformed citizen confronting a benevolent service provider who has designed a system to suit their purpose. Since it is not designed for the citizen, she cannot be considered digitally empowered; and digital empowerment is critical in a knowledge society and economy.

Today, India is perhaps in the early days of digital inclusion, rather than empowerment. Many barriers exist, not to mention side effects of the way in which the digital project is unfolding.

Read the full article about India's digital inclusion initiative by Bikalp Chamola, Gyanesh Nanore and Sanjiv Phansalkar at India Development Review.