Women @ Work

Google India and Tata Trusts’ digital inclusion initiative Internet Saathi has benefited 17 million women in rural India, bringing with it economic freedom. The workforce of the future will be more gender-balanced

- Monica Bathija

It’s not without reason that the phrase ‘papad belna’ denotes hard work. Or as Manisha Abhang of Karandi village, about 35 km from Pune, calls it, ‘traas’. Faced with the problem of how she and other women from her village could make this task easier, they turned to the internet to look for an automatic papad-making machine. They haven’t bought it yet, but are piqued about its prospects already. “We can make about 100 papads a day while two women using the machine can make about 1,000 papads a day,” says Abhang, 40, part of a collective of eight women in her village who started a business making potato chips last October and are now looking to diversify into papads.

It’s a story that goes back to last June when Vandana Potdar, trained and tasked with the job of familiarising rural women with the internet as part of Google India and Tata Trusts’ Internet Saathi programme, arrived in the village. The programme was launched in 2015 with the objective of improving digital literacy among women in rural India and Potdar, 29, a resident of nearby Shikrapur village, was assigned a cluster of villages in the area.

When she started visiting houses in villages to teach women, some households told her the women didn’t have time for all this, while others kept her waiting outside for an hour or two until they cross-checked her credentials. But she persisted. If someone had to go work in the fields, she would teach them while they worked, showing them videos of sowing crops and soil testing. If someone was pregnant, she would show her maternal health care videos. With housewives, new recipes worked. She helped others look up new designs for clothes, how to shop online and use mobile wallets, and also encouraged them to make and sell things to earn an additional income.