Digital Exclusion and Social Security Access in Informal Women Workers in Post-COVID India

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed and intensified the antecedent socio-economic vulnerability of the informal sector of India, which largely involves the women workers who make up the large but undignified portion of the workforce. The case of the pandemic situation is also characterised by the government moving toward further digitalisation of welfare programs and social security payments, through the e-SHRAM portal, Aadhaar-validated Direct Benefit Transfers (DBTs), and smartphone-based registrations. But this shift to a digital government has omitted informal women workers since there are great barriers to digital inclusion based on their gender. The current article proposes the importance of digital exclusion as a structural issue in the access to social security of informal women workers in post-COVID India. It examines the major causes of digital exclusion that include, absence of smartphones, the absence of digital literacy, gender roles that limit the use of technology, and poor connectivity in deprived regions. The secondary statistics and reports will be utilised in the research. The awareness, the enrolment rate, and utilisation of the major social security schemes such as the e-SHRAM portal, PM Garib Kalyan Yojana, and others are also at the centre of the paper to find out the existing digital divide in the outreach and implementation process concerning women workers. It also ascertains the interventional character of access to digital welfare by the intermediation bodies like the NGOs, Self-Help Groups (SHGs), and community-based organisations. Its results indicate that although the process of digitization was supposed to contribute to the growth in the levels of transparency and efficiency, it has contributed to the strengthening of the gendered disparities in receipt of state support in the majority of cases. Concluding the paper, the recommendations include a policy of the inclusive nature of digital infrastructure, the design of social security schemes based on gender-sensitive characteristics, and the pressing of digital literacy campaigns by the communities with the aim of ensuring that social protection is more accessible in the digital age.