Marking 24 Years of DEF and 30 Years of the Internet in India | A Year-End Reflection on Digital Empowerment, Equity, and Agency
Digital Empowerment Foundation
Dear Friends and Fellow Digital Citizens,
As we come to the close of another year and as the Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) completes 24 years of work, in a year that also marks 30 years of the Internet in India, I find myself returning to a question that has guided DEF since its inception in 2002:
Who does the digital revolution truly serve?
India’s digital journey has been remarkable. In three decades, the Internet has transformed connectivity, platforms, payments, and now artificial intelligence reshaping how we live, work, and govern. Yet for millions of citizens, particularly women, rural communities, informal workers, and first-time internet users, the digital world remains fragile, mediated, and uneven.
At DEF, over the last 24 years, we have learned one lesson repeatedly: technology is not neutral. It either expands rights, dignity, and opportunity, or it quietly deepens exclusion.
From the beginning, DEF recognised that lack of access is not just a technical gap, but a structural form of exclusion. Bridging this divide required more than devices or connectivity, it required methodical, people-first innovation rooted in local realities.
This understanding led DEF to build a hyperlocal, community-driven digital empowerment model, led by local women social entrepreneurs known as SoochnaPreneurs.
Launched in 2016, the SoochnaPreneur model is designed to bridge the last-mile digital divide by equipping rural and marginalised women as Information Entrepreneurs, with digital tools, skills, and infrastructure. Operating at the village level, SoochnaPreneurs provide digital literacy and facilitate access to critical information on e-governance, welfare schemes, health, education, livelihoods, and financial services. Services are delivered with empathy, transparency, and affordability, strengthening trust and community ownership while strengthening a self-sustaining local entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Central to this work is DEF’s phygital approach, which intentionally blends physical community presence with digital platforms and services. Digital empowerment, we have learned, cannot be delivered online alone. It must be anchored in physical spaces, villages, community centres, libraries, clusters, and local institutions, where trust is built, mediation happens, and people feel safe to learn and ask questions.
This phygital approach is guided by a glocal lens: deeply local in design and delivery, yet informed by national and global digital governance debates. While DEF’s interventions respond to hyperlocal needs and lived realities, our learnings travel outward, shaping policy conversations on Digital Public Infrastructure, AI, digital rights, and inclusion across India and global platforms. In this way, local communities do not merely receive digital systems; they actively shape how digital futures are imagined and governed.
Today, with over 2,400 SoochnaPreneurs across 26 states and 250+ districts, DEF’s work has reached more than 10,000 villages and over 35 million people. This scale is not accidental; it is the outcome of believing that digital empowerment must be local before it can be national or global.
From Access to Agency
This year, our work across villages, tea gardens, artisan clusters, and peri-urban communities reaffirmed a simple truth that has shaped DEF’s journey from the very beginning: connectivity alone does not create empowerment.
What makes digital systems meaningful is human support, trust, and local ownership. Through community Wi-Fi libraries, digital village ecosystems, and women-, PwD- and youth-led digital leadership, we witnessed how the internet becomes transformative only when people are supported to use it with confidence and purpose.
Our Work, Across Ground and Governance
During the year, DEF’s efforts unfolded across interconnected program pillars that together shape a people-centric digital society.
Through the ongoing projects and programs such as Internet Roshni, Smartpur, and the Samriddh Gram, our work demonstrated how broadband, when combined with trained community facilitators and local institutions, translates into real access to education, healthcare, livelihoods, and governance.
Through Digital Cluster Development and GI-based artisan programmes, women artisans and micro-entrepreneurs bridged tradition and technology, strengthening incomes, preserving cultural heritage, and emerging as digital leaders within their communities.
Through MILaap and our Media and Information Literacy work, we addressed the growing threats of misinformation, online fraud, and digital harm by building critical thinking, digital safety, and civic awareness, especially among women, PwDs, youth, and first-time internet users.
Through the Just AI – Data & Algorithms for Communities initiative and DEF’s People-Centric Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) framework, we brought grassroots voices into national and global conversations on AI, data justice, and accountability. We consistently emphasised that digital systems must adopt a community-in-the-loop approach and function as rights-enabling infrastructure, not merely as tools for efficiency.
The Digital Citizen Summit, DEF’s flagship platform, continued to play a vital role in this ecosystem. Conceived as a space where policy, technology, civil society, academia, media, and communities meet, the Summit centres citizens, not platforms, at the heart of digital governance. Centering focus on access, accountability, digital harms, AI ethics, and platform responsibility, the Digital Citizen Summit ensures that grassroots experiences inform national and global digital debates, and that the voices of the most marginalised are heard where decisions are made.
Alongside this, DEF’s research, policy advocacy, and global engagements extended across India, national, regional and international digital governance platforms, ensuring that lived realities from the grassroots inform policy, rather than the other way around.
The Museum of Digital Society continues to anchor this journey, preserving more than two decades of DEF’s work as a living, public space where technology meets humanity, memory, and justice.
Together, these efforts reflect DEF’s enduring belief:
Digital systems must be built with people, for people, and be accountable to them.
Confronting Digital Harms, Co-creating Digital Futures
As digital systems grow more complex, so do the risks they carry. This year reminded us that digital literacy is no longer optional; it is a form of social protection.
Across communities, we saw how women, PwDs, youth and rural citizens are often the first to face digital harms, yet also the strongest leaders in building safer, more informed digital spaces when given the right tools and support.
Looking Ahead
As we move into the coming year and into DEF’s next chapter, our work remains guided by one non-negotiable principle:
If digital systems do not work for the most marginalised first, they do not work at all.
Our commitment is to continue building digital futures rooted in dignity, equity, and democratic participation, where technology serves people, not the other way around.
This year, we also launched Edge, a podcast by the Museum of Digital Society, created to explore the intersections of digital technologies, citizenship, and access to rights. The first season traces the evolution of the internet in India over the last three decades, weaving together personal reflections from my journey—as a young journalist, early netizen, citizen, digital technology writer, consumer, developer—and the eventual transition to building the Digital Empowerment Foundation. Together, these conversations offer a grounded, lived history of India’s digital transformation and its implications for inclusion and rights.
You can watch the trailer of the podcast here:
I invite you to continue walking with us as partners, allies, and critical friends in this shared journey. Thank you for your support, commitment and collaboration.
Join me in watching this video that captures 24 years of memories, growth, and gratitude:
With warm wishes for a thoughtful, hopeful, and purposeful New Year ahead,
Osama Manzar
Founder & Director
Digital Empowerment Foundation
Building a just, inclusive, people-centric digital society
From the grassroots of India to global digital governance platforms
Visit the Website: www.defindia.org
