16 Nov 2025 Digital justice After WSIS+20: What the Global Digital Compact means for India’s marginalised

Aniruddha Jena and Sriyanka Sahoo

The 20-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS+20) and the Global Digital Compact set out a simple test: the digital world should expand rights, dignity and opportunity, not narrow them. [1][2] In an eastern India state, Odisha, that test has felt painfully concrete this year.

In a report published by Down To Earth, [3] an aggressive sweep to verify public-distribution ration cards through Aadhaar, India’s nationwide biometric identification system, using e‑KYC, the electronic “know‑your‑customer” match against the Aadhaar database, covered roughly 32.6 million cards and confirmed 27.1 million, yet left about 2.4 million pending by July. Only 98,664 verifications were recorded outside the state, so migrant workers trudged home to keep their entitlements alive. A headline claim that five million cards were “fake” was later contradicted in the Assembly record, with none detected since mid-June 2024. [3][4] When a fingerprint reader fails or a 4G signal drops, the portability promised under One Nation One Ration Card stalls, and the distance between digital aspiration and daily bread is measured in kilometres and calluses.

The promise of WSIS+20 and the Global Digital Compact (GDC) is that such gaps are neither inevitable nor acceptable. WSIS+20, the twenty-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society, reaffirmed that digital transformation must be people centred, inclusive and development oriented. [1] The GDC, adopted at the UN’s Summit of the Future in 2024, sets shared principles: universal and meaningful connectivity, protection of human rights online, trust and safety, responsible data governance, and artificial intelligence that serves human development with guardrails. [2] None of this is a treaty. All of it is an invitation to turn principles into practice through laws, budgets, institutions and remedies that work for the last user.

Scholars of the information society have long cautioned that becoming digital is as much about institutions and power as it is about networks and devices. Classic accounts chart the shift to knowledge-led economies but also warn against technological determinism and urge attention to work, inequality and governance. [14][15][16] For the global South, the early digital divide lens usefully counted access, yet it often obscured quality, affordability and voice, gaps that persist unless policy targets meaningful use, not mere connection. [17]

India’s digital justice gap

India is a fitting place to read this agenda against reality. The country has built influential digital public infrastructure (DPI): Aadhaar for identity, UPI for instant low cost payments, DigiLocker for documents, and ONDC to make e‑commerce more open. These building blocks have supported new services and lowered transaction costs. They have also shown how scale and justice are not synonyms. For justice, the access must be affordable and usable every day, the spaces must be safe, participation must value every language and ability, and accountability must activate swiftly when systems fail.

Affordability is the first lever. India’s data is cheap by global standards, but the entry ticket is a device you own and can trust. For low-income households, an “affordable” smartphone can still swallow a daunting share of monthly income, [7] tariff hikes pinch further. In rural districts, the signal may be unstable, the handset shared, and data rationed. That means connectivity that is not daily, fast or private. Public access points, common service centres, libraries and community networks, can bridge the gap, but funding and maintenance are uneven, as subscription data show. [5] In policy debates, a useful benchmark is “meaningful connectivity”: daily access on an appropriate device, 4G like speeds, and enough data or an unlimited connection at a regular location. [8] Without all four, the online world is less a gateway than a revolving door. Put differently, many people are not excluded but incorporated on adverse terms, connected, yet in ways that reproduce existing disadvantage. [18]

Language and accessibility are the second and third levers. Much of India’s internet remains English first where it matters most. The government’s Bhashini initiative is building Indian language artificial intelligence as a public good, it is an important start. [9] But many essential interfaces still demand workarounds if you do not read English or Hindi easily. For persons with disabilities, accessibility compliance is inconsistent across public and private apps: screen readers fail on unlabelled buttons, video lacks captions, keyboard navigation is an afterthought. Accessibility cannot be bolted on later. It must be coded in and validated with users, with organisations of persons with disabilities leading the audit and the feedback loop.

Safety shapes who speaks and who leaves. Women, Dalit and Adivasi communities, and linguistic minorities face targeted harassment and organised pile ons, the reporting pathways often break down in the very Indian languages where abuse is rampant. Platforms still staff Indian language moderation thinly, disclosure on staffing, tooling and response times is partial at best. A predictable result follows: slower takedowns of abuse, uneven enforcement, and communities pushed to the margins of the conversation. The GDC’s call for trustworthy online environments will ring hollow unless platforms invest in language wise safety capacity and independent audits, and regulators learn to measure harm where it actually occurs. [2] Framing this through communication rights keeps the focus on access, participation, pluralism, gender equality, safety and accountability, the preconditions of digital justice, and aligns with emerging data justice approaches that ask who benefits, who is harmed and whose knowledge counts. [21][20][19]

Rights and enforcement set the floor. India enacted the Digital Personal Data Protection Act in 2023, but key provisions remain to be operationalised as of early September 2025. Draft rules were issued in January, everyday users still lack consistent, language friendly complaint routes and a visible cadence of enforcement. [12] On the network side, India continues to feature in global tallies of internet shutdowns. While totals fluctuate, each prolonged suspension functions like a collective punishment: shopkeepers lose payments, students lose classes, and clinics lose tele health. International norms are clear: restrictions must be necessary, proportionate and time bound, with public reasons and independent review. Domestic practice must match that test. [6]

Financing and design are the hinge. The Telecommunications Act 2023, renames the Universal Service Obligation Fund as Digital Bharat Nidhi and, through 2024 rules, widens its scope. That is an opening to invest in community networks, public Wi‑Fi, device libraries and accessibility retrofits in the districts that markets sidestep, Adivasi belts, border blocks, low density hamlets. The money matters, but so do the modalities: open dashboards, social audits, local co-ownership, and district level targets for coverage, quality and uptake. When public funds subsidise affordability and inclusive design, private providers and platforms will follow the incentives. [11]

The benefits of DPI are real and worth defending. UPI has made tiny transactions viable at scale. In August 2025 it crossed 20.01 billion transactions in a single month, worth Rs 24.85 lakh crore, roughly Rs 24.85 trillion, up about 33% year on year from August 2024, per NPCI data reported by Moneycontrol. [13] Aadhaar has sped up routine ID checks, DigiLocker has trimmed paper chases, ONDC holds promise for small sellers who want a fairer marketplace. [10] Yet exclusion hides in the seams. A fingerprint mismatch at the ration shop, a name format error that locks a widow out of a pension, a dead zone that blocks a benefit transfer, a grievance portal that assumes literacy and patience. The remedy is not retreat but redesign: offline alternatives at every critical step, human help that is available and accountable, and appeal routes that resolve cases within published timelines in the user’s language.

Three snapshots from India show both promise and warning. First, community networks. Over the past decade, locally governed wireless networks, such as Gram Marg in Maharashtra or the Digital Empowerment Foundation’s Wireless for Communities, have connected villages that commercial logic writes off. With spectrum access, affordable backhaul and local training, they support tele education, livelihoods and local media. These are not mere pilots; they are proofs of concept that public financing plus community ownership equals resilient inclusion. Second, a long shutdown’s shadow. In Manipur during 2023, mobile internet was suspended for months. Shops could not accept digital payments, students missed classes, tele‑medicine sputtered. The bluntness punished the many for the misdeeds of a few. [6] Third, inclusive commerce, slowly. ONDC aims to make e‑commerce interoperable so smaller sellers can reach buyers without gatekeepers. Early experiences show potential, alongside usability and grievance redress gaps for first time sellers and buyers in smaller towns. [10] Inclusion is not a checkbox, it is a maintenance regime.

What should change

What would it mean to align India’s path with WSIS+20 and the GDC, without turning the agenda into another brochure? First, adopt meaningful connectivity as the national yardstick and publish district level targets and budgets: 4G/5G coverage, device affordability, public access points, and quality benchmarks for speed and latency. [8] Second, operationalise the data protection law with independent oversight and easy complaints in Indian languages, including low literacy pathways by phone and in person. [12] Third, rewrite the shutdown playbook so that necessity, proportionality and public reasons are hard prerequisites, require independent review before and after the fact, and publish transparency reports that name locations, durations and rationales. [6] Fourth, mandate accessibility by default across essential public services and large platforms, let organisations of persons with disabilities lead audits, with findings linked to time bound fixes. Fifth, use Digital Bharat Nidhi to back community networks, public Wi‑Fi and device libraries where gaps are widest, with open dashboards so citizens can track spending and performance. [11]

Platforms and providers have matching responsibilities. Design for low literacy and low bandwidth by default: voice prompts, local language interfaces, offline workflows, and privacy protections for shared devices. Invest in Indian language safety teams and publish language wise response times, submit to independent audits and publish risk assessments that name the harms you will fix this year, not someday. [2] Offer genuinely affordable device financing options with consumer protections. [7] Regulators can help by publishing affordability and quality metrics disaggregated by rural/urban, gender, caste, disability and language, so that policy tracks lived inequality rather than national averages. [5]

Civil society and academia are the connective tissue. Support panchayat level community networks with public interest technologists, measure costs, performance and social impact so successes scale and failures are not repeated. Run safety clinics with women’s groups, Dalit and Adivasi organisations, and linguistic minorities, co-design reporting pathways that work locally and feed back into platform practice. Track DPI exclusions and insist on fixes, no one should lose food, cash or healthcare because a biometric device fails or a tower is down. Donors should fund patient capital for last mile connectivity, device libraries and accessibility retrofits, and put serious resources into public interest research on DPI and platform governance in non-English Indian languages. WSIS+20 and the GDC both stress multi stakeholder participation, make it real by paying for travel, translation and time so grassroots groups can show up and be heard. [1][2]

The AI frontier

There is also the frontier question of artificial intelligence. As Indian language models proliferate, the risks of encoded bias, surveillance creep and content manipulation grow. The GDC’s language on safe, human-centred AI is useful, but safeguards must be specific: public registers of high-risk deployments, impact assessments that include caste, gender and disability, and appeal rights when automated systems make or shape decisions affecting entitlements or speech. [2] Critical information society research reminds us that infrastructures stabilise arrangements of power, AI at scale will deepen those arrangements unless checks travel with systems into deployment. [15] India’s experience with population scale DPI is an asset here, but only if governance keeps pace with ambition.

None of this requires reinvention. It requires follow-through with the people who most need the system to work. If Odisha’s ration card drive teaches anything, it is that a system can “work” on paper and still fail in practice if design ignores the realities of migration, language and signal strength. [3] The justice test for the next phase is straightforward: can a woman in Koraput, or Khandwa, Kiphire or Kulgam, complete a transaction in her language on a device she can afford, in a place with a reliable signal, with help when she needs it and an appeal when something breaks? If the answer is yes, WSIS+20 and the Global Digital Compact will have done more than coin phrases. They will have shifted power to the people the internet was meant to serve. ν

Notes

[1] International Telecommunication Union (ITU). World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)+20 High-Level Event 2025 | WSIS+20 High-Level Event 2025. (n.d.). WSIS+20 High-Level Event 2025. https://www.itu.int/net4/wsis/forum/2025/en

[2] United Nations. (n.d.). Global Digital Compact. In A/79/L.2. https://www.un.org/global-digital-compact/sites/default/files/2024-09/Global%20Digital%20Compact%20-%20English_0.pdf

[3] Panda, S., & Swain, M. (2025, July 22). How has Odisha’s public distribution system fared after one year of its new government? Down to Earth. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/governance/how-has-odishas-public-distribution-system-fared-after-one-year-of-its-new-government

[4] Swain, D., & Panda, S. (2025, January 3). Odisha: Data gaps and faulty e-KYC implementation leave migrants struggling for ration. The Wire. https://thewire.in/government/odisha-data-gaps-and-faulty-e-kyc-implementation-leave-migrants-struggling-for-ration

[5] Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and Press Information Bureau (PIB). Highlights of telecom subscription data as on 31 July 2025. (n.d.). https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2161931

[6] Software Freedom Law Center, India. (2025, February 17). Internet Shutdown Report 2023–2024. https://sflc.in/sflc-in-releases-internet-shutdown-report-2023-2024/

[7] Shanahan, M., & Bahia, K. (2024). The State of Mobile Internet Connectivity 2024. GSMA. https://www.gsma.com/r/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/The-State-of-Mobile-Internet-Connectivity-Report-2024.pdf

[8] Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI). Meaningful Connectivity: Definition and policy resources (2019–2021). https://a4ai.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Meaningful-Connectivity_Public-.pdf

[9] Bhashini (National Language Translation Mission). Mission and portal (2024–2025). https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/specificdocs/documents/2025/jun/doc2025612568801.pdf

[10] Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) and independent assessments (2024–2025): early consumer and seller experience, usability and grievance redress. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=2090097

[11] Department of Telecommunications / Press Information Bureau. DoT notifies “Telecommunications (Administration of Digital Bharat Nidhi) Rules, 2024.” (n.d.). https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2050737

[12] Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Draft Digital Personal Data Protection Rules. (n.d.). https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/specificdocs/documents/2025/jan/doc202515481101.pdf

[13] Anand, J. (2025, September 1). UPI crosses 20 billion monthly transaction milestone in August, valued near Rs 25 lakh crore. Moneycontrol. https://www.moneycontrol.com/technology/upi-crosses-20-billion-monthly-transaction-milestone-in-august-valued-near-rs-25-lakh-crore-article-13506159.html

[14] Duff, A. S. (1998). Daniel Bell’s theory of the information society. Journal of Information Science, 24(6), 373–393. https://doi.org/10.1177/016555159802400601

[15] Mansell, R. (2010). The life and times of the Information Society. Prometheus, 28(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/08109028.2010.503120

[16] Mansell, R. (2009). The Information Society: Critical Concepts in Sociology. Routledge. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/23743/

[17] Avgerou, C., & Madon, S. (2005). Information Society and the Digital Divide Problem in Developing Countries. In J. Berleur & C. Avgerou (Eds.), Perspectives and Policies on ICT in Society (IFIP, Vol. 179). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-25588-5_15

[18] Heeks, R. (2022). Digital inequality beyond the digital divide: conceptualizing adverse digital incorporation in the global South. Information Technology for Development, 28(4), 688–704. https://doi.org/10.1080/02681102.2022.2068492

[19] WACC. Data for Digital Justice: Gender Equality in the Age of Information. (n.d.). https://waccglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/WACCPartners-GDCRecommendations-EN.pdf

[20] De Souza, S. P. (2025). Can data justice be global? Exploring the practice of digital rights, and the search for cognitive data justice. Information, Communication & Society, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2025.2471889

[21] WACC. Nothing about us without us: why digital justice requires communication rights. (n.d.). https://waccglobal.org/nothing-about-us-without-us-why-digital-justice-requires-communication-rights/

Aniruddha Jena (PhD) is Assistant Professor in the Communications Area at the Indian Institute of Management Kashipur. His work focuses on communication rights, alternative and community media, and communication for development & social change.

Sriyanka Sahoo is a Mukhyamantri Research Fellow and PhD Candidate at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, Utkal University, Odisha. Her on-going PhD work focuses on the larger issues, questions and politics of media and marginalization.