Lifting the Ghoonghat to Google

ALWAR: In the tube-lit basement of the NGO Ibtada in Alwar, Savita Kanwar tucks her ghoonghat behind her ear, pulls up a phablet and speaks earnestly into it: "Gehun ki fasal dekhni hai." She scrolls down the links, and climbs back up to Hindi Wikipedia, then speed-reads the passages to find the ones she claims showed her a variety of high-yield seeds.
Savita, a 32-year-old landowner in Naglajarh village, may be a latecomer to the Internet revolution but she’s catching up fast.A member of a self-help group in Alwar, Rajasthan, Sarita was selected by Google India seven months ago to become an I-Saathi, an internet evangelist. One of the 170 women trained in Rajasthan, she’s expected to introduce other women in at least three nearby villages to the digital life via the Google-given phablet. The job pays her Rs 2,000 a month.
The tech company partnered with Tata Trusts in August last year to get its rural digital literacy programme off the ground across a targeted 300,000 villages. The programme, currently in nine states, trains literate rural women in the operational basics of mobile internet. They’re given a smartphone, a tablet and a cycle, and taught how to draw fellow village women to the web, a mission made easier by Google Voice Search.
“We ask them what they’d like to see on the internet, and often enough it’s a famous dargah or temple, like Vaishnodevi or Ajmer Sharif — places they may never visit,” explains Savita. Picture shown, darshan done, the I-Saathi probes, “What else?” In their initial explorations, the women call up recipes, TV serials and sari blouse designs, but the recruits are trained to help them dig deeper — for news, government schemes and subsidies, healthcare advice, exam information for their children. They’re also learning to communicate on WhatsApp.

In the village of Naglijhamawat in Alwar, Phoolwati says she used her smartphone to educate women about Rajasthan’s welfare schemes like the Bhamashah Yojana, which offers medical reimbursements, and her own family has applied for the Shauchalaya Yojana — the toilet-building sanitation scheme.
Only 12% of rural internet users in India are women, says a report by Internet and Mobile Association of India and market researcher IMRB. (They even include women who use mobile internet at least once a month). But their tribe is expected to grow even though many may not own a smartphone themselves.
Which is why rural women — doubly distanced from the digital mainstream by their social and financial incapacity — are the target of several ongoing mobile internet literacy programmes. These initiatives are sponsored by the state and private sector and executed by not-for-profits. This April, Vodafone launched a digital literacy programme for rural women and youth in Tamil Nadu, called ‘Empowering Women and Rural Communities through Digital Literacy’, targeting 50,000 trainees.
There is, of course, no denying the corporate motive in charitably attempting to build the subscriber base: a telecom company wanting to ratchet up data consumption; and a search engine creating a content consumer market to reap advertising revenue.
In the Alwar basement, Google’s Internet Saathis itemize popular search requests from women: the “correct” way to perform karva chauth rituals; new hairstyles; dances; pickle recipes… In time, the programme hopes the women will apply the learning to their livelihood — sew new blouse designs for example; make and sell new dishes — making digital literacy transformative.
“Technology is powerful. But it must be accompanied by skills and confidence for women to use it as a tool for empowerment,” emphasizes Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami of IT for Change. Last year, IT for Change, in partnership with WWW Foundation, conducted a survey in the slums of Delhi to assess how access to the internet and social media platforms empowers users. They found that only 4% of women who used social media said it helped them find a job or improved their incomes; the statistic for men was 12%.

“We make the automatic assumption that access to connectivity leads to benefits of connectivity, but it’s not so linear,” Chami points out. “When you go online it’s not only about opening Google’s browser, or starting a FB account, but where does this lead me?”
Facilitators may have to deal with a more primal problem: the suspicion with which the smartphone — in the hands of a woman — is viewed in the village. “If I declare all our digital resource centres are replacing PCs with mobiles, half the women won’t be allowed to attend training,” says Osama Manzar, founder and director of Digital Empowerment Foundation. “Anything that gives women private access to information and communication is regarded as dangerous.”
Manzar foresees a cataclysmic change in the coming decade. “There’s a very strong need for information at the grassroots, and currently, it’s the men who find out about government schemes and apply for them,” he says. “But I do believe the smartphone will help narrow the gender digital divide in time to come. When women users reach 40% of all internet consumers, we’ll have a serious nationwide challenge.”
With inputs from Kim Arora