New Delhi, 13 November 2026: In today's digital age, smartphones are no longer just a means of communication, but have become the gateway to daily life. However, the digital gender gap is still a big challenge in the country. According to a comprehensive survey conducted by the National Statistics Office between January and March 2025, shocking figures have emerged in the study of more than 1.4 lakh people from approximately 35,000 families in the country. The report shows that there is still a huge gap between urban and rural areas and between men and women in terms of access to technology.
If we look at the statistics of mobile phone ownership among people aged 15 years and above, this proportion is 90% among urban males, 80.7% among rural males, 71.8% among urban females and only 48.4% among rural women. That is, 51.6% i.e. more than half of the women in rural areas do not have their own personal mobile phone. If we compare the figures of both the cities, the difference between rural women and urban men is more than 40 percent, which is much bigger than the difference between rural and urban men alone.
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Statistics of youth are more worrying
The study also revealed that among the people who have phones, most of them have smartphones (ranging from 75.6% among rural women to 89.4% among urban men). That is, there is no problem of having expensive gadgets or machines, but the basic problem is of 'owning the phone first'. The figures for the youth are more worrying because 95.7% of the rural girls in the age group of 15 to 24 years have used a phone in the last three months, yet only 51.7% of them have their own personal phone, compared to 74.8% of the rural youth.
There is a big difference between a mobile phone and a personal phone. Sahiyaro phones are mostly monitored phones, where the lender can view search history, messages, banking details and can even retrieve the phone at night. If phones were just a hobby or a luxury, this would be a minor inconvenience, but now scholarship forms, pension records, health care appointments, job applications and bank transactions all happen behind a screen. A person who has to borrow a screen may miss important deadlines, because in today's time the mobile phone is not only a means of communication but also a piece of freedom.