Internet Saathis: How Google is Connecting Rural Women With Phones

“In some of these village, you see women often held back by the male family members,” says Google’s marketing head.

As we end our conversation, Rohini is eager to exchange numbers. Her fingers flit nimbly across the screen of her new smartphone and she’s adamant that I send her our photographs as soon as I have time. Rohini hasn’t been using a smartphone too long, and she’s particularly possessive about it. “I couldn’t function without it,” she confesses, as she tells me about the small bee-keeping unit she runs back in Satara, Maharashtra.

Rohini is one of the many women who claim to have been directly influenced by Google and Tata Trusts’ ‘Internet Saathi’ programme.

“My Own Bee-Keeping Unit”

Since its launch in 2015, Google and Tata Trusts have spoken of expanding their Internet Saathi programme to about 300,000 villages across the length and breadth of India – hoping to make women in rural India “digitally literate”. The idea, at its barest minimum, is to place a smartphone in the hands of a woman who may have never operated one before, and encourage her to expand the horizons at her fingertips.

So far, Google claims, over 12 million women have benefited from the scheme (it has been rolled out in 12 states already) – and about 30,000 ‘internet saathis’ (women who’ve picked up the technology and are now training others) are passing on the knowledge.

When you go and visit some of these villages, you can see that women are often being held back by the male members of their families. The latter often believe that women don’t need the internet or even a smartphone.

Sapna Chadha, Marketing Head, SEA & India, Google

Reiterates Raman Kalyanakrishnan, Head of Strategy, Tata Trusts:

Many of the women who’ve gone on to become internet saathis have told me their ‘first success stories’ – and they’re not what I imagined. Many of them were told by the men in their lives at some point – ‘Arey, phone ko haath mat lagao, khraab ho jayega’ (Don’t touch the phone, you’ll ruin it). For these women, after their digital literacy programme, their personal success stories came when those very same men asked for help with their phones, with an app or a setting.

Heartened by the rapidity with which this new group of internet saathis picked up digital knowledge, Google and Tata Trusts have now decided to extend the programme to create livelihood opportunities too, through internet usage. Says Chadha:

We watched, astonished, as these women moved from digital literacy (the original programme) to entrepreneurship – which is when we decided to come up with FREND – Foundation for Rural and Entrepreneurship Development. Unlike you and me, these women don’t take the internet for granted. They get on it to harness their skills; some of them have solved pest problems by Googling online! They check exam scores, access government schemes.

Rohini will testify to that, as she grins and tells me about how she started her bee keeping unit:

Initially, my husband and other members of the family would tell me – ‘kya madhumakkhi dhoondne ke liye jungle mein ghoom rahe ho’? (why are you out hunting for honeybees in forests?) But I refused to give up. I’d always been interested in opening my own honey business, and I Googled everything I could about it. I started with about 20 bee boxes two years ago; now I have 50!

Rohini tells me how her family has now come around, but what stays with me longer is the passion with which she divulges details of her bee-keeping, gesticulating with her hands and displaying her brand new website to me with the flushed pride of a new entrepreneur.

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My Own Identity

Her enthusiasm is matched, if not surpassed, by her fellow internet saathi Madhavi from Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh. Madhavi speaks little to no English or Hindi, but through an interpreter is able to communicate to me the joys of her internet learning so far.

My husband drives a lorry; I was a housewife till I discovered what I could do for myself. Where initially I’d only know how to type in numbers to make (and receive) phone calls, I now look for recipes online and ways to design blouses and jewellery.

As Madhavi says this, she holds up her hands which are bedecked with bangles that she tells me she has designed herself. Through words passed on by an interpreter, Madhavi powerfully asserts, “Earlier, I didn’t have an identity; now, I do.”

Perhaps, FREND will help foster that identity further, and help unearth a few more glorious bee-keeping, designing, business-operating dreams. We’ll hear of them on the internet.