Leveraging the Internet for Empowering Marginalized Sections: Insights from Case Studies

For communities that have been pushed to the margins – by caste, gender, geography, or disability – the internet is not a convenience. It is a potential equalizer. When deployed with the deliberate intent of inclusion, digital technology has the power to transform welfare delivery, amplify silenced voices, and bridge educational gaps that have persisted for generations. But what does this actually look like on the ground? The answer lies in the case studies. From government welfare portals to grassroots community media and innovative educational platforms, real-world examples reveal how the internet is being used not just to connect people, but to genuinely empower them.

Understanding the context: Who are the marginalized? 🔗

The term “marginalized sections” refers to groups historically pushed to the edges of society due to factors like caste, class, gender, disability, or geographic remoteness. In India, this includes Dalits, Adivasis (tribal communities), women in rural households, people with disabilities, and communities living in areas without reliable infrastructure. For these groups, access to information, government services, and platforms for expression is not guaranteed. Research published in the journal Sustainability notes that digital exclusion among marginalized individuals is compounded by low digital literacy, lack of culturally relevant content, and minimal education on online safety – making digital inclusion a persistent challenge rather than a solved problem.

Sociological analysis of digital inclusion in India shows that while the National e-Governance Plan (2006) and the Digital India Mission (2015) sought to expand connectivity and e-services nationally, the benefits have not been distributed uniformly. Urban, upper-class populations benefited first, while Dalits, tribal communities, rural women, and the rural poor continued to struggle with limited access – a reflection of how structural inequalities in Indian society shape even the process of digitization.

Case study 1: State initiatives and welfare portals 🔗

One of the most direct ways the internet serves marginalized communities is through government-run welfare portals and e-governance platforms. These digital tools have fundamentally changed how welfare reaches its intended beneficiaries.

Direct Benefit Transfer and the JAM trinity 🔗

India’s Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) system, powered by the Aadhaar-UPI-Jan Dhan (JAM) trinity, is arguably the most significant digital welfare experiment in the world. The Aadhaar biometric ID, the world’s largest biometric identification system covering over 1.3 billion residents, anchors the entire framework. By linking bank accounts directly to Aadhaar numbers and mobile phones, the JAM system ensures subsidies – from LPG cooking gas to rural employment wages – flow directly to beneficiaries without being siphoned off by middlemen.

The results are quantifiable. As of 2024, the DBT mechanism had generated ₹3.48 lakh crore in savings by eliminating duplicate and ghost beneficiaries and plugging leakages in the system. For a poor widow in Jharkhand or a tribal farmer in Chhattisgarh, this means their entitlements actually reach them – sometimes for the first time. The system also promotes women’s financial independence, as many Jan Dhan accounts are held by women who previously had no formal banking relationship whatsoever.

State-level portals and Common Service Centres 🔗

State governments have also developed their own digital infrastructure to serve marginalized citizens. Research on e-governance in India highlights examples such as West Bengal’s BanglarMukh portal, which enables citizens to access government services and information, and Punjab’s Suwidha Centres, which provide single-window service delivery. These platforms reduce the need for multiple visits to government offices – a significant burden for daily-wage workers and people in remote areas.

Common Service Centres (CSCs) – physical kiosks established across rural India under the Digital India programme – function as access points for public utility services, social welfare schemes, healthcare, and financial services in areas where individual internet access is limited. For communities without smartphones or data plans, these CSCs serve as the crucial last-mile connection between the government and the citizen.

Case study 2: Digital literacy programmes and the PMGDISHA initiative 🔗

Access to the internet means little without the ability to use it. This is where targeted digital literacy programmes become critical. The Pradhan Mantri Gramin Digital Saksharta Abhiyan (PMGDISHA) directly addresses this gap. Launched under the Digital India programme, PMGDISHA is one of the world’s largest digital literacy campaigns, aiming to ensure rural citizens’ inclusion in a knowledge-based economy by training at least one member of every rural household.

The scheme teaches participants to use devices like tablets and smartphones for basic tasks – internet browsing, email, digital payments, and accessing online government services. It is implemented through CSCs, with Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLEs) at the ground level. The scheme is notable for its partnerships: organizations like NASSCOM Foundation, Intel, and UNESCO have collaborated to mobilize resources and infrastructure. Over 5.9 million individuals have been trained through PMGDISHA to actively participate in digital governance, though qualitative assessments highlight persistent challenges around last-mile connectivity, network reliability, and trainer preparedness.

Case study 3: Community-driven digital media for marginalised voices 🔗

State initiatives provide the framework, but some of the most powerful examples of digital empowerment come from communities themselves. Marginalized groups have built their own media ecosystems online – bypassing mainstream narratives to tell their own stories.

The Mooknayak: Community journalism as digital empowerment 🔗

On January 30, 2021, journalist Meena Kotwal launched The Mooknayak, a digital news portal exclusively focused on the issues of India’s marginalized groups – particularly women, Dalits, and religious minorities. The outlet relies on reporters from underprivileged backgrounds who report with firsthand insight on issues of caste discrimination, systemic exclusion, and state accountability. As Kotwal has explained, the driving force behind the platform was her own experience of caste-based discrimination while working at a mainstream news organisation.

The Mooknayak’s rapid growth reflects a real hunger for this kind of representation. A 2019 collaborative study by Oxfam India and Newslaundry found that 88% of all journalists and editors in Indian newsrooms belong to upper-caste groups, even though these groups make up roughly 20% of the country’s population. Portals like The Mooknayak exist precisely to fill the representational void this creates, giving audiences who rarely see themselves in mainstream media a credible, community-rooted source of news.

Dalit Camera and Round Table India 🔗

Community media platforms like Dalit Camera and Round Table India represent another model of digital empowerment. These platforms leverage digital channels to amplify Dalit voices, provide alternative news and perspectives, and document instances of caste-based violence. Using YouTube and Facebook, Dalit Camera distributes raw video footage of public meetings, songs, lectures, and testimonies – content that rarely finds space in conventional broadcasting.

According to research published in ScienceDirect, community media platforms like the Dalit Camera YouTube channel and RoundTable India, managed by marginalized communities, highlight the concerns of Dalits, Adivasis, and minorities in front of mainstream audiences. Through student volunteers from across India, these platforms raise issues using accessible formats like raw video footage of songs, lectures, and public meetings. Digital campaigns such as #DalitLivesMatter, #WhyLoiter, and #DalitWomenFight have further demonstrated how social media can shed light on caste-based violence, public harassment, and systemic exclusion, forming online communities that amplify Dalit viewpoints at a scale that was previously unimaginable.

CGNet Swara: Voice journalism for tribal communities 🔗

Not all communities are literate or have access to smartphones, and this is where voice-based digital platforms like CGNet Swara made a critical contribution. CGNet Swara is a voice forum for citizen journalism in rural India, particularly designed for tribal communities in central India who face barriers of literacy, low connectivity, and limited access to conventional digital media. Using a simple phone call, community members can record and listen to news, grievances, and local information in their own languages – making digital participation accessible even without internet connectivity or reading ability.

Case study 4: EkStep Foundation and open educational infrastructure 🔗

Education is perhaps the most powerful tool for long-term mainstreaming of marginalized communities. But the quality of education varies drastically between elite urban schools and under-resourced rural government schools. The EkStep Foundation has taken a distinctive approach to solving this at scale – not by building a single app, but by creating open digital infrastructure that the entire education ecosystem can build upon.

EkStep was founded by Nandan Nilekani, Rohini Nilekani, and Shankar Maruwada to tackle the multidimensional problem of lack of access to learning opportunities in India, with a specific focus on improving literacy and numeracy. Its central philosophy – called Societal Platform Thinking – holds that for solutions to work at the scale of hundreds of millions, they need to be designed so that the problem gets solved by the entire ecosystem, not just one organisation.

Sunbird and the DIKSHA platform 🔗

EkStep developed Sunbird, an open-source, configurable, and modular digital infrastructure designed for scale, released under the MIT license so any government, NGO, or private entity can use and adapt it. Sunbird’s most consequential deployment is powering DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing), the Ministry of Education’s national platform for school education. DIKSHA has digitized educational content across different school boards in 36 Indian languages on a single platform, addressing the enormous linguistic diversity of the country – a challenge that no single organization could have solved alone.

The ecosystem model has proved critical here. By involving the entire ecosystem – including the private sector, the social sector, and individual contributors – EkStep amplified social impact significantly. Teachers, for instance, needed content in 36 languages across 60 boards including NCERT. Rather than building all this internally, EkStep opened the platform to the entire ecosystem, enabling co-creation at a pace and scale that top-down approaches could never achieve. An affordable private school in Rajasthan can now have its own branded learning app. A vocational training provider can plug in and offer upskilling courses through the same infrastructure.

EkStep’s broader digital public goods mission 🔗

EkStep’s work extends beyond education. In March 2024, EkStep established a Joint Innovation Centre with Amazon Web Services (AWS) India to foster the development of innovative digital public goods and digital public infrastructure across sectors including education, agriculture, finance, healthcare, and climate change. The collaboration aims to support both public institutions and governments in building digital solutions for population-scale use – accelerating societal transformation while helping build socially inclusive economies.

EkStep’s initiatives now span a range of projects including Sunbird, PeoplePlus AI, Bachpan Manao (an early childhood development initiative), ONEST, and more – each designed with the core belief that when individuals are equipped with the right tools and opportunities, they become agents of transformation themselves.

The digital divide: Why case studies alone aren’t enough 🔗

These case studies are inspiring, but they must be read against the persistent reality of the digital divide. The gendered digital divide alone restricts women’s participation in accessing essential government services, welfare schemes, and financial inclusion programs – perpetuating economic dependency and social marginalization. In many rural households, men control the only available phone, and cultural norms actively discourage women from independent technology use.

Beyond gender, the Digital India programme itself acknowledges that marginalized communities, differently-abled individuals, and those in rural and remote areas still need targeted interventions to meaningfully participate in the digital economy. Infrastructure gaps – “not spots” with no signal in tribal or hilly belts – remain a real barrier. Language remains another: much of the internet’s content ecosystem still skews toward English and a handful of dominant languages, excluding millions who speak India’s hundreds of minority tongues.

Crucially, e-government implementation can sometimes exacerbate rather than alleviate digital inequalities, particularly in contexts with low digital penetration and weak regulatory frameworks. Authentication failures in Aadhaar-linked systems, for instance, have in some documented cases blocked genuinely eligible beneficiaries from receiving welfare – a reminder that the technology itself must be designed and monitored with the most vulnerable in mind.

What makes digital inclusion work: Key lessons from the case studies 🔗

Looking across these examples, a few consistent factors distinguish successful digital inclusion initiatives from those that fall short. First, community ownership matters. Platforms like The Mooknayak and Dalit Camera work because they are built by and for the communities they serve – there is no translation layer of intent or understanding. Second, open infrastructure enables scale. EkStep’s model shows that building reusable, open-source digital public goods allows solutions to grow far beyond what any single actor can achieve. Third, the last mile must be deliberate. Whether through CSCs, PMGDISHA, or voice-based platforms like CGNet Swara, reaching those who are furthest from digital access requires specific, targeted investments – not just general connectivity expansion.

The internet is not inherently emancipatory. But as these case studies demonstrate, when digital technology is deployed with the explicit intent of inclusion – backed by state commitment, community participation, and innovative platform thinking – it becomes one of the most powerful tools available for social justice and democratic participation.

What do you think? As India’s digital infrastructure continues to expand, how can policymakers ensure that welfare portals and e-governance platforms genuinely reach those most excluded – rather than simply creating a new layer of bureaucracy that the digitally literate navigate more easily? And can community-led digital media platforms like The Mooknayak and Dalit Camera sustain their independence and growth without the kind of institutional backing that mainstream media enjoys?

References

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