Digital Access and Educational Inequality among School Students in India: Regional, Gender and School-Level Disparities

Digital technology has become increasingly important to school education in India, but expansion in connectivity has not produced equal opportunities for students. This study examines digital access and educational inequality among school students using secondary data from UDISE+ 2025–26, the NITI Aayog analysis of UDISE+ data for 2014–15 to 2024–25, and the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024. The analysis distinguishes between school-level digital infrastructure, household access, individual control over devices, digital skills and educational use. At the national level, the proportion of schools with computer facilities reached 69.9 per cent and internet connectivity 67.4 per cent in 2025–26. The longer comparable UDISE+ series shows that functional computer availability rose from 26.42 per cent in 2014–15 to 64.7 per cent in 2024–25, while school internet access rose from 8.05 to 63.5 per cent. These improvements conceal striking interstate disparities: in 2024–25 computer availability ranged from 100 per cent in Lakshadweep to 19.7 per cent in Meghalaya, while internet availability ranged from 100 per cent in several Union Territories to 18.6 per cent in West Bengal. ASER 2024 further reveals that household smartphone availability among rural adolescents aged 14–16 is close to universal, but access does not imply autonomy or digital competence. Although 90.2 per cent of boys and 88.1 per cent of girls reported a smartphone at home, only 36.2 per cent of boys and 26.9 per cent of girls who could use a smartphone owned one themselves. Gender differences become more pronounced in effective device availability, digital safety and selected digital tasks. The study concludes that India's contemporary digital divide is increasingly a divide not simply of connectivity but of ownership, autonomy, skills, quality of access and meaningful educational use.