Short essay: Is technology widening or narrowing inequality in India?

The story of technology in India has been told twice over: as the great equaliser that put a banking app and a doctor's consultation in the same villager's palm, and as the great divider that separated those with bandwidth from those without. Both versions are partly correct, which is why the simple question — is technology widening or narrowing inequality? — does not yield a clean answer. The honest reply is that technology has done both at once, and that the balance now tilts towards narrowing only when the state actively designs it that way. Left to markets alone, technology amplifies whatever inequalities the country already has. Made into a public infrastructure, it can become the single most powerful instrument of equalisation in a generation.

The narrowing has been most visible in finance. Before the Unified Payments Interface, less than a third of Indian adults made a digital transaction in a typical month. By 2024 the figure had crossed three-quarters, with the steepest gains coming from rural households and women, who had been most excluded by branch banking. Aadhaar-linked direct benefit transfers have moved over thirty lakh crore rupees to citizens since 2014, much of it to households that had never seen a formal financial account before. CoWIN, the vaccination platform, delivered over two billion doses through a system that was the same in Mumbai as in Mizoram. In each case, a digital public good built once at national scale erased a layer of intermediation that had historically taxed the poor most heavily.

The narrowing has been visible in services beyond finance too. The eSanjeevani teleconsultation platform has carried more than thirty crore consultations, the majority from sub-district health facilities where a specialist had never been available. ONDC has begun to make the discovery of small sellers possible without the marketing budgets that large incumbents alone could afford. DIKSHA has pushed teacher-training and student content into low-bandwidth Android phones in every district. None of these is a complete answer, but each represents a structural narrowing — a poor citizen, for the first time, gaining access to a service that her income would not have bought her in the private market.

And yet the widening is just as real, and it has been most acute in education and work. The school closures of 2020 and 2021 exposed an inequality that the school day had been quietly equalising: poorer children studied for less than an hour a day while richer ones continued nearly uninterrupted on private platforms. Generative AI is now beginning to amplify a similar gap in higher education and white-collar work. A student with a paid subscription, a quiet room and a parent who can guide the prompt receives a tutor of effectively unlimited capacity; a student without those advantages does not. The same divergence is appearing in the labour market, where the workers most exposed to automation are precisely those without the resources to retrain.

The defenders of unfettered markets will argue that technology eventually trickles down — and the history of the mobile phone, which became universal in two decades, gives that argument some force. But trickle-down took two decades for the mobile phone, and the question is whether a country with India's social fault-lines can afford that pace for the next wave. The risk of waiting is that technology will compound existing inequalities — of caste, of gender, of geography — into a digital inheritance that the next generation cannot escape on its own merit. The risk of acting is far smaller: India already knows how to build digital public goods at scale.

The conclusion, then, is conditional rather than absolute. Technology is narrowing inequality wherever the state has deliberately designed it as public infrastructure, and widening inequality wherever the state has left it to private channels. The lesson of UPI, Aadhaar and CoWIN is the lesson of the next decade: the same architecture, extended into education, skilling and care, can keep the gains of the digital revolution widely shared. The reverse — passivity in the face of the next wave — is the surest way to convert a tool of equalisation into one more instrument of advantage.