The screen on Tara’s* phone blurred, the audio dissolved into a static, and the lecture froze mid-sentence. Not because the professor had paused but because the internet did. However, the lecture, somewhere hundreds of kilometers away, continued without her. She anxiously waited, refreshing her screen and moving closer to the window in the hope of a stronger signal. By the time the connection returned, the lecture was over. For Tara, a first-generation learner from the family of tea garden workers in West Bengal, the event was not an exception but rather an everyday happenstance.

Digital education is celebrated as a powerful equalizer for being a flexible, scalable, and democratic medium. Its underlying principle is reaching the "last mile" by bringing access to the best classrooms in the country from anywhere. But on the ground, we can see that digital classrooms are an echo of the hollow promises of expanded opportunity.

Tara grew up in a small village in West Bengal. She, together with her mother, worked as laborers in the vast tea gardens owned by big companies. She poignantly shares that her community has been earning their livelihood through contractual labor since colonial times. They work from 7 AM in the morning until 3 PM in the afternoon and earn meager wages, only enough to sustain themselves. This vicious cycle of poverty became the driving force for Tara to obtain an education and break it. She pursued her bachelor's from a local college and soon enough realized that she lacked the skills required of a graduate to secure stable employment.

To make up for that, she started volunteering with a local organization while also working on the tea garden. She spent her mornings at the tea garden doing the physically demanding work and in the evenings and nights engaged with the volunteering activities while also preparing for the entrance examination of the top social sciences institute in the country. After two years of rigorous work, she cleared the entrance exam for the course. And unlike other success stories, in this one the protagonist does not move ‘onward and upward’ or live happily ever after. While the act of clearing the exam in itself was a violent rupture for her community to celebrate, it did not survive the digital turn.

Online classes assume a set of invisible preconditions of uninterrupted electricity, access to personal digital devices, affordable high-speed internet connectivity, fluency in English, familiarity with digital platforms, and a room to oneself. However, Tara had none of these. Tara had grown up in a predominantly Nepali-speaking community; hence, lectures in English felt like a shock to her. Upon reaching out to professors, she was asked to participate in a peer buddy program for language assistance. However, that program was irregular and inconsistent. Tara’s village had recurring power cuts, and the internet data was expensive and unreliable. She attended the classes on a shared mobile phone, struggled to download readings, and recorded lectures that buffered endlessly. When she mustered courage and again reached out to professors, she was advised to move somewhere else for better connectivity. This solution presumed resources that she did not have. Although highly inconvenient, she did decide, against her family’s wishes, to move 10 km away to a relative’s place for better connectivity. However, she could barely sustain herself for 2 weeks, after which she had to return. 

She started taking loans from friends and relatives to fund her education, bought a secondhand laptop, and paid the mounting bills. The class activities and group assignments used to take place at night, and another limitation was that electricity was not available beyond 9 PM in her village. Her family advised her to leave the course and return back to the field, but she was persistent in her efforts. Her university finally took cognizance of her struggles and managed to send a laptop, but that alone cannot solve all the problems, can it? Eventually overwhelmed by debt, digital unfamiliarity, and institutional apathy, Tara deferred her studies. I reconnected with her after two years to ask her about her studies and if she went back to completing her course, and she shared that she tried but exceeded the timeline and was refused re-enrollment.

What Tara was struggling the most with was not the absence of efforts or aspiration but what scholars call "conversion capacity," which is the ability to turn access into meaningful outcomes. Globally, Tara’s experience is far from isolated. UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Gender Report warns that digitalization, without attention to inequality, risks reproducing and deepening existing hierarchies. UNICEF estimates that adolescent girls and young women in low- and middle-income countries are significantly less likely than boys to have access to the internet or digital skills training. The World Bank has documented how difficulties in accessing remote learning during the pandemic increased disengagement and dropout risks, particularly among marginalized students. In India, surveys of higher education students during the pandemic show stark disparities. Female students, rural learners, and first-generation college-goers were more likely to report inability to cope with online learning due to internet costs, device-sharing, and lack of digital literacy support. These are not minor inconveniences. They are structural barriers.

Yet the policy response often collapses “access’ into checkboxes: providing digital devices, tokenist bridge programs to build educational capital, or moving classes online. What is not spoken of is the labor of learning itself: the time, skills, languages, and institutional support to successfully navigate digital education. Access without enablement is a violent practice. Building aspiration is not an individual trait; rather, it is a social capacity, as Arjun Appadurai argues, which is shaped by resources, recognition, and navigational maps. Tara had cultivated this capacity painstakingly by imagining a future beyond the tea garden through education, but education, instead of liberating, became a mirror reflecting her place in the hierarchy.

As universities continue to digitize, the question is no longer whether technology can expand education, but for whom. What happens when aspiration is cultivated, encouraged, celebrated, and then quietly abandoned at the altar of bandwidth? And how many futures are we willing to lose before we call this what it is: not a glitch, but a form of structural violence?

*Name changed to protect identity.

- Aarushee Shukla is a Laadli Media Fellow. The opinions and views expressed are those of the author. Laadli and UNFPA do not necessarily endorse the views.