By Digital Empowerment Foundation Published on: May 06, 2025 Salem is a paradise surrounded by hills and dotted with hillocks. With its vibrant culture, Salem is significant in various aspects, noteworthy for its location and social setup. Besides its well-known textile industries, especially handloom products and handicrafts, Salem is also known for its eye-catching scenic…
By Digital Empowerment Foundation Published on: May 06, 2025 Chandni, a 28-year-old resident of Chvad Padi village in Rajasthan’s Alwar district, lives with her husband, father-in-law, and three young children, one son and two daughters. Coming from an economically marginalised background, Chandni has long defied gender stereotypes in her pursuit of financial independence and dignity.…
By Digital Empowerment Foundation Published on: May 06, 2025 A group of rural women demonstrates that learning opportunities exist for every age group in a distant rural area. These women, known as Champion Sakhis, use their curiosity together with smartphones and their passion for learning to enter the digital world with both pride and confidence.…
By Digital Empowerment Foundation Published on: May 06, 2025 In Mithiyawas, at Tijara tehsil of Rajasthan’s Alwar district, 65-year-old Ramkali was battling silent hardships. A widow dependent on her monthly pension for survival, she found herself struggling when, for several months, her pension suddenly stopped without explanation. Like many elderly residents in rural India, Ramkali…
By Digital Empowerment Foundation Published on: May 06, 2025 In the heart of Bharatpur, Rajasthan, a determined woman is challenging long-held stereotypes and redefining what it means to lead with purpose. As the coordinator of a Smartpur centre, Ataiya is not just delivering critical services like governance, healthcare, finance, and education, she is igniting change…
By Digital Empowerment Foundation Published on: May 06, 2025 In the twenty-first-century world we inhabit today, the digital domain functions as an essential reality framework that both develops communication practices and powers business operations while helping authorities function better, sustaining social movements, and changing how we live. Digital technology represents more than technical innovation since…
Artificial Intelligence (AI), a technology that collects, classifies, and identifies patterns in data to perform tasks that are usually done by humans, can be considered one of the most prominent buzzwords of the 21st century.
Until a few months back, Kalawati, a housewife from rural Ajmer, would mostly watch videos and reels on her son’s smartphone. Like her, many rural women across the country are made to hear, “Phone to mardon ke liye hota hai. Aurton ke haath me phone aye toh bas bigadne ka darr satane lagta hai” (Phones are meant for men—when a woman gets a phone, there is a fear of her going astray).
In rural India, women have never been just caregivers—they have always been the backbone of their communities, the ‘silenced’ architects of the rural economy. Women-led micro-enterprises make up 20% of all MSMEs, employing 22–27 million people. Yet, an overwhelming 82% remain trapped in informality (NITI Aayog, 2023).
The role of women in care work and reproductive labour has been discussed extensively in popular media and critical feminist scholarship. In a rapidly digitalising country, patriarchy has successfully penetrated the digital realms, reinforcing divides that are not only spatial between the rural and the urban but starkly gendered, too.
