Do you think digital technology promotes social empowerment? Explain with examples.

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Ghissu Editorial · Accepted Answer

Digital technology promotes social empowerment conditionally, widening access and voice where literacy, devices and safeguards exist and deepening exclusion where they do not. Over 50 crore Jan Dhan accounts carry Direct Benefit Transfers, yet NFHS-5 found only about one in three women had used the internet.

**Introduction**

India's digital public infrastructure, from Aadhaar and Jan Dhan to UPI, has reached crores of poor households. Whether it empowers depends on who gains access, voice and dignity, and who is left behind.

**How Digital Technology Empowers the Marginalised**

1. **Financial inclusion**: Over 50 crore Jan Dhan accounts carry Direct Benefit Transfers for pensions, scholarships and PM-KISAN without middlemen.
2. **Women's agency**: Uttar Pradesh's BC Sakhi scheme (2020) made rural self-help group women village banking correspondents.
3. **Services and voice**: eSanjeevani, SWAYAM and Bhashini take care, courses and languages to remote villages, and #MeToo (2018) gave survivors of harassment a platform, while Dalit and Adivasi creators publish without gatekeepers.

**Where Digital Technology Deepens Exclusion**

SKETCH: forcefield | Digital Technology and Empowerment
center: Social empowerment
driving: Public digital rails, Cheap data, Platform voice
restraining: Gender gap, Exclusion errors, Online abuse

1. **Gender divide**: NFHS-5 (2019-21) found only about one in three women had ever used the internet, against more than half of men, so many reach services through a male relative's phone.
2. **Exclusion errors**: Santoshi Kumari's death in Jharkhand (2017), after her family's ration card was cancelled for not being linked to Aadhaar, shows how linking failures deny welfare.
3. **Abuse and control**: AI-generated sexualised images of women (2026), communal hate and opaque gig algorithms, which Rajasthan's Gig Workers Act, 2023 began to address, make platforms unequal spaces.

**Conclusion**

Yes, digital technology promotes social empowerment, but conditionally: it empowers where literacy, devices and safeguards exist and excludes where they do not. Closing the gender gap, keeping offline fallbacks and enforcing the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 can make it an equaliser.

Do you think digital technology promotes social empowerment? Explain with examples.

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