I am Manisha Aryal. I am advising the Digital Empowerment Foundation on technology. Recently, I found myself in the rugged mountains of Uttarakhand, India — a place of breathtaking beauty, but also immense challenges when it comes to digital connectivity. Internet Service Providers ignore this landslide-plagued region, as the ROI in setting up towers for remote, sparsely populated villages is very low.
The result? Military veterans, small landholders, business owners, entrepreneurs, and students have to traverse across tough terrain just to access e-government portals, do their banking, download lesson plans and test results, and use basic public digital services. Connectivity is a journey — quite literally.
I spent the week with colleagues from the Digital Empowerment Foundation, who are working tirelessly to bridge this digital divide, linking far-flung Uttarakhand hamlets to the digital world — one village at a time.
My takeaway: For digital transformation to truly work in geographically-challenged and historically-marginalized regions, we need to anchor our efforts in what I’m calling the “Three Eyes of Digital Transformation”:
- Digital Citizen Infrastructure: Building robust, context-specific digital infrastructure — think point-to-point connections, mesh networks, signal boosters, satellites, and more.
- Infomediaries Rooted in Communities: Upskill trusted community members so they can be their community’s information intermediaries (DEF calls them soochnapreneurs — a blend of “soochna,” or information, and entrepreneurs).
- Actionable Information: Accurate, timely, and usable information — whether related to state and federal benefits, health and disaster information, digital financial services, or social enterprises.
These villages in India are living proof that investing in the three “Eyes” — digital citizen infrastructure, upskilling of local infomediaries, and making actionable information accessible — pays off. It transforms remote hinterlands into opportunity hubs by connecting them to the India’s digital public infrastructure.
