Majority of elderly feel excluded from India’s digital literacy drive – Agewell Foundation study

The Centre’s flagship Digital India scheme, to create a digitally-empowered society, may elude a vast section of the country’s population — the old and vulnerable — if one goes by a survey done in Delhi-NCR alone. A majority (75 per cent) of 5,000 old people surveyed by Agewell Foundation said that lack of computer skills and digital illiteracy was affecting their life in old age adversely. The survey found 85.8 per cent respondents to be digitally and computer illiterate. Of this, 76.5 per cent were men and 95 per cent were women, with 82.4 per cent of the digitally illiterate respondents saying they considered themselves “marginalized and under-privileged” in the new settings of society governed by modern infotech and internet. With the rising trend of the elderly left to fend for themselves, 85 per cent respondents grumbled that their younger family members avoided communicating with them due to their inability to understand the modern digital language of communication.