The National Family Health Survey 2023-24 (NFHS-6) captures household-level and individual-level information on various aspects, including socio-economic characteristics, employment, digital and financial inclusion, land ownership, women’s empowerment, domestic violence, etc., with the major focus being on health and nutrition. Among all indicators tracked in the sixth round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-6, 2023-24), one stands out for the sheer scale of its change: the share of women who have ever used the internet. This figure nearly doubled, rising from 33.3% in NFHS-5 (2019-21) to 64.3% in NFHS-6 (2023-24). This gain is often attributed to the Government of India’s Digital India Mission and the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating digital adoption for welfare transfers, remote schooling, and platform-enabled services such as delivery and home-based work. Additionally, the surge in affordable smartphones and an aggressive push by central and state governments to bring women into the digital ecosystem played a major role, including initiatives such as the free distribution of digital devices, including the Rajasthan government’s distribution of 40 lakh smartphones under the Indira Smartphone Yojana.

Yet the national average obscures significant regional variation. The states recording the largest increases are Andhra Pradesh (42.6 percentage points), followed by Uttar Pradesh (39.4 percentage points), Telangana, Bihar, and Jharkhand—all of which had scored particularly low on this indicator in the previous NFHS round, conducted during 2019-21. In addition to the low base effect leaving room for significant improvement, national initiatives for enhancing digital access might have worked really well in these states. At the same time, states like Tripura, Odisha, and Assam remain below 55%, and their limited progress—out of step with the national trajectory—suggests that the policy levers effective elsewhere were not equally effective here. Closing the gender gap in these geographies will require solutions adapted to context-specific constraints.

A pronounced rural-urban divide also persists. Internet usage among urban women stands at 77.3%, compared to 58.6% among rural women. The fact that rural women lag behind both their urban counterparts and rural men points to barriers beyond affordability and infrastructure. In rural settings, where the pace of modernisation tends to be slower and social norms are more restrictive for women, they are often subject to greater social surveillance, with both the content they access and the time they spend online monitored more closely. As we look at the rural-urban gap in women’s internet usage within the states, the gap is highest at 29 percentage points in the case of Karnataka, followed by Maharashtra and Gujarat at 27 percentage points, Chhattisgarh at 25.4 percentage points, and Tripura at 24 percentage points, underscoring the disparity in digital inclusion between rural and urban geographies within the states.

The gap in internet usage between men and women is similarly wider in rural areas, at 19 percentage points, against 10 percentage points in urban areas. Across the majority of states, this gender differential is more pronounced in rural areas compared to urban areas. The gender gap remains highest at 26.4 percentage points in Karnataka, 34.3 percentage points in urban areas and 16.1 percentage points in rural areas, followed by Tripura, with an aggregate gap of 23.1 percentage points, disaggregating into 27.2 percentage points in urban areas and 12.1 percentage points in rural areas. The gender gap exceeds 20 percentage points in states such as Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Telangana, and Tamil Nadu. The gender differential in digital inclusion reflects intra-household disparities in resource distribution that manifest as a gender gap in digital device ownership. Moreover, there is a two-way causality between women’s limited digital inclusion and women’s constrained participation in the economy—with limited digital inclusion creating a barrier to women’s participation in the economy, while at the same time, women’s limited workforce participation reduces their access to digital devices. Additionally, women’s participation in digitally enabled employment and their usage of the internet for other purposes, like social media and news consumption, are subject to greater scrutiny due to prevailing social norms.

There is, however, an important caveat to how far these numbers can be read. The survey question capturing internet usage is binary; it asks only whether a woman has ever used the internet. While this serves as a useful baseline of digital inclusion, drawing inferences about its impact on other dimensions of women’s empowerment or agency from it requires considerable caution. The caution pertains specifically to what can be concluded from the jump in this single indicator, acknowledging that the survey was never designed to capture digital inclusion in its full breadth and depth.

Firstly, the question captures no information on continuity of access to the internet. But continuity of access is crucial for productive engagement in digitally enabled work, whether location-based platform work such as delivery and domestic services, or crowd-sourced tasks such as data annotation and image tagging, since these engagements require consistent, fast internet connectivity. The indicator does not allow us to distinguish between a woman who has accessed the internet once on a shared device and one with seamless, independent connectivity. A complementary indicator captured in NFHS data, of ‘women having a mobile phone that they themselves use’, is instructive in its framing. However, for many states, we observe a significant gap between the values of these two indicators. There are states where the proportion of women using the internet exceeds the proportion of women using a mobile phone by a considerable margin. The states with a gap exceeding 10 percentage points are Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Jharkhand. This gap indicates that many of these women are likely accessing the internet on a shared or family device rather than their personally owned handset.

Secondly, the purpose of use is not captured. Internet access contributes differently to women’s agency, earnings, and workforce participation depending on whether it is used for economic work, accessing welfare schemes, health information, social media, education, or entertainment. The headline figure, therefore, cannot tell us whether digital access is translating into meaningful digital empowerment.

Lastly, there is an age truncation in the data: NFHS collects information only for women aged 15–49, leaving out older women who are, in the Indian context, disproportionately likely to face digital exclusion. The headline figure is therefore a partial picture.

Assessing what digital access means for women’s economic empowerment and personal agency requires information that goes beyond ever-use and captures frequency and continuity of access, purpose of use, device ownership versus shared access, and the social conditions that determine whether access translates into real opportunity.

Thus, digital inclusion in the true sense encompasses adequate access to digital devices, stable and affordable internet infrastructure, functional digital literacy, and digital safety competencies (including privacy protection and information verification skills to mitigate exposure to cybersecurity threats, fraud, and misinformation). The fulfilment of these conditions, in turn, can help translate the promising rise in women’s digital inclusion into more pronounced participation in the rapidly digitalising economy.

None of this diminishes what NFHS-6 tells us. A near-doubling in the share of women who have ever used the internet is historically significant, reflecting both the expansion of digital infrastructure and the results of sustained policy effort in recognising women’s digital inclusion as a development imperative. The purpose of this analysis is not to discount that achievement, but to push for a more transformative digital future for all.

This blog is written by Bidisha Mondal, Head- Research and Strategy at IWWAGE