How is the increasing use of technology changing the status of women in Indian society? (2014)
Technology has changed Indian women’s access far faster than their authority. Measured by connectivity, money and information, the gain is large; measured by ownership of assets, control over fertility and freedom from violence, the change is partial and in one domain negative. The change is one of degree: technology has widened women’s reach while leaving the structures that allocate power intact.
Livelihood: displacement first, new work later
- Bina Agarwal (A Field of One’s Own, 1994) established the decisive point: a woman’s bargaining position rests on command over land, not on access to implements. Green Revolution mechanisation displaced women from the operations they dominated — transplanting, weeding, threshing, hand-processing — while tractors, tubewells and harvesters passed into male hands.
- The result is a feminisation of agricultural labour without a feminisation of control: women form a growing share of the farm workforce as men move to non-farm work, yet the Agriculture Census records them operating under 13% of holdings, leaving them outside credit, extension and scheme entitlements.
- Newer technology is beginning to cut the other way. The Namo Drone Didi scheme (2023-24 to 2025-26) equips 15,000 women’s self-help groups with agricultural drones, meeting 80% of the package cost and certifying a member as a pilot — a machine entering as a woman’s occupational asset rather than as a substitute for her labour.
The body: technology turned against the girl child
Diagnostic technology produced the sharpest reversal. Ultrasonography converted a cultural preference for sons into an efficient practice of elimination, so Amartya Sen‘s “missing women” (1990) multiplied as medical technology spread. The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994 had to prohibit sex determination outright — a rare case of law banning a technology for its social consequence. Assisted reproduction repeats the ambiguity: the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act, 2021 and the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021 widen choice for some women while regulating the commercial use of poorer women’s bodies as reproductive labour.
Connectivity, money and voice
The last few years show genuine movement. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-6, 2023-24) records women who have ever used the internet rising to 64.3% from 33.3%, women owning a mobile phone they themselves use at 63.6% from 53.9%, and women with a bank account they operate at 89.0%. Direct benefit transfers into women’s own accounts and self-help group banking make income visible and separable from the male household head — a material basis for the autonomy that Leela Dube (Women and Kinship, 1997) showed patrilineal kinship denies.
Where the change stops
Access is not authority. Judy Wajcman (Pressed for Time, 2015) argues that digital acceleration compresses rather than relieves women’s time, because domestic responsibility is unchanged. The phone is often a household resource mediated by husband or father; online harassment, morphing and deepfake abuse penalise visibility, and Uma Chakravarti‘s brahmanical patriarchy explains why Dalit and Muslim women are targeted most.
Conclusion
Technology in India has proved an amplifier of existing social relations: it deepened son preference when medicine made it cheap, and it is widening autonomy now that money and information reach women directly. The decisive variable is not the device but whether women hold the land, the account and the licence — which is why asset ownership, not connectivity, remains the real measure of status.