How the Internet is Changing Lives in Tea Gardens of Assam and North Bengal

In the villages in large tea estates of North Bengal and Assam, a cluster of people huddles around a place, eyes glued to their screens: some are watching downloaded learning materials, some are applying for jobs or their entitlements, some are talking to their acquaintances, some watching movies or even playing games. Thanks to an initiative aptly named Internet Roshni (“Roshni” meaning light) that is bringing digital connectivity to these communities.

Scenes like these are increasingly becoming common in these tea garden villages, especially in times where glaring evidences of digital divide can be found across rural India. Only about 24% of rural households have access to the internet, compared to 66% in urban areas. Alarmingly, the gap seems to be widening in its usages. Oxfam’s 2022 India Inequality Report (Digital Divide) points out that 31% people in rural areas uses internet in comparison to 67% in urban.

The villages in lush tea estates of this region are emblematic of such deep digital divide. The problem is not simply with irregular or unstable connectivity; the bigger problem lies with the ways problems are approached to be solved. The Comprehensive Annual Surveys from 2022–23 to 2025 demonstrate that access is slowly getting better, although experts say that big differences still exist between social groups.

People who are still not connected to the internet are often the most disadvantaged, and this lack of access to important services like education, health care, and banking. Despite flagship efforts like Digital India, BharatNet, and the PM-WANI public Wi-Fi scheme, internet is still a luxury for lot of people, not something they need. People often say that broadband should be treated like electricity, as a public good. But that involves paying for access, teaching people how to use technology, and making sure that technologies work for everyone, even the poorest.

Limits of PM-WANI

Launched in 2020, the PM-WANI scheme was implemented with the idea to democratise connectivity, to enable anyone who could set up a Public Data Office (PDO) and offer internet access to the public. However, the progress has been uneven. One major roadblock was cost. Small shopkeepers, the very people expected to run these PDOs, found the high-priced leased lines required for backhaul connections expensive. It was not until mid-2024 that the government stepped in to cap these tariffs in hopes of encouraging wider adoption.

But cost was not the only problem. Many hotspots that were put in place were never used.  Uptake stayed low, especially among the disenfranchised, mostly because they didn't know much about computers.  In essence, PM-WANI put the technical backbone, such as wires, routers, and bandwidth, ahead of the social side of connectivity. And that's when the true job of inclusion usually starts.

A community-led alternative: Internet Roshni

Complementing PM-WANI’s hardware-heavy approach, the Digital Empowerment Foundation, with support from the Internet Society Foundation, implemented Internet Roshni programme in 2023-24: a low-cost, last-mile network designed to bring meaningful connectivity to tea garden communities in Assam and West Bengal.

The model has been strategic in leveraging PM-WANI scheme, in creating localised Wi-Fi zones. It creates localised Wi-Fi zones anchored around Community Internet Libraries (CILs) – village resource centres stocked with tablets and digital learning content – and trains local youth and women to serve as “SoochnaPreneurs”.

These SoochnaPreneurs act as digital guides for their neighbors, helping people get online, teaching them basic skills, and assisting them in navigating e-government services safely.

With over 50,000 beneficiaries targeted across 100 tea gardens, the project focused not only on connectivity, but on what that accessible connectivity could enable. The idea is to use these hotspots into community assets – a place where students could download learning materials, aspirants could learn new techniques online, and workers could access to their entitlements.

In essence, Internet Roshni invested in human infrastructure alongside tech – by designing the programme with local needs in mind and providing on-the-ground mediation through the SoochnaPreneurs, Internet Roshni hoped to turn connectivity into a catalyst for affecting multiple dimensions of development.

What really changed when people get internet connectivity? That was the question at the heart of an evaluation conducted after a year of Internet Roshni on the ground. The initiative’s architects wanted to know: Does giving a woman Wi-Fi, curated content, and a role of SoochnaPreneur who help her neighbors learn more, earn more, stay healthy, or access government services better?

How the impact was measured?

To explore what difference Internet Roshni made, a cross-sectional endline survey has been conducted between January and February 2025. 389 households were surveyed across 12 tea garden villages – three in Assam’s Jorhat district and nine in West Bengal (Alipurduar, Coochbehar, and Jalpaiguri). About 85% of the respondents were from villages that had the Internet Roshni intervention, and 15% were from the controlled areas – the nearby tea garden communities where the initiative has not taken place, serving as a comparison group.

The villages were all within 5-10 km of an Internet Roshni site and were chosen for their similar socio-economic profiles, to ensure a fair intervention vs. control comparison. The survey’s scope ranged across education, livelihood, health, and governance – asking people about how they use digital technology, whether and how their habits changed, and if they were accessing any new services like online learning or welfare schemes. The sample deliberately included women, young people, and households tied to tea work.

Multiple dimensions of development with internet

As a first step, straightforward descriptive comparisons between intervention and control areas have been performed and the results showed clear differences.

One broad pattern stood out: simply having access to a working internet hotspot – coupled with community support – dramatically changed how people used their phones. Both the village sites had high rates of phone ownership (over 90%), but almost all the respondents in the Internet Roshni sites reported being internet users (90%), compared to only about 74% in the nearby control areas. Moreover, due to training that was provided, almost everyone in the intervention sites had reported about being able to assess online information, while only about 32% in control areas did.

For students and youth, connectivity translated into learning. In villages with Internet Roshni, an overwhelming majority of households reported that their children now go online for studies – whether it’s doing homework research, watching tutorial videos, or accessing educational apps.

At the time of the survey, about 85.8% of respondents in these sites said someone in their family (often a school-going child) had used the internet for education in the past month, more than double the proportion in the villages (36%) without the programme.

Internet access also broadened people’s economic imagination. In the Roshni sites, 93% of respondents said they had looked up some form of income-related content online, whether it was job listings, information on government livelihood programmes, or tutorials on farming and small businesses. By contrast, in the non-Roshni villages, that figure was about 75% – substantial, but clearly lower. What this suggests is a growing ambition among the connected communities.

That is especially notable in areas where stable employment, other than relying on tea estates, is scarce. These numbers hint at a growing interest among rural youth in alternative livelihoods and skill development. With this line, 85% ‘strongly’ perceives that internet access improved their understanding of local business opportunities.

Perhaps the most visible change was in how people interacted with the state. Awareness of government welfare schemes improved: nearly all respondents in intervention villages (97–100%) said they knew what schemes were available, compared to less than 70% in control areas. And knowledge translated into action, 96% of treated households had applied for at least one scheme online in the past year, versus just 39% in the control group.

Several respondents reported that digital access helped them avoid intermediaries or extra payments. Between 95% and 100% of respondents in intervention sites perceive those digital services in their villages made welfare access better.

Role of internet in shaping attitudes and aspirations

These multi-dimensional changes in daily life have also been accompanied by a subtle yet important shift in attitudes and aspirations. A series of multivariate logistic regressions have been performed, focusing on four domains of change that came up repeatedly in the field: (1) attitudes toward online learning, (2) awareness and access to government welfare schemes, (3) health information–seeking, and (4) entrepreneurial aspirations. In each case, three key predictors have been examined: whether someone lived in an intervention village, whether they were a direct project beneficiary, and whether they were a frequent internet user.

The impacts are statistically significant. On online learning, for example, people in intervention villages were nearly five times more likely to view it positively (AOR: 4.81; p = 0.001), while direct participants were over eleven times more likely (AOR: 11.68; CI: 3.61–37.77; p < 0.001). Civic knowledge and ambition followed a similar trend. In the Roshni villages, residents were almost ten times more likely than those in non-connected villages to know about government welfare programmes and how to access them.

Health information seeking behaviours also shifted in meaningful ways. People in intervention sites were nearly three times more likely to look up health content online (AOR: 2.81; p = 0.015), and direct beneficiaries were five times more likely (AOR: 5.04; p = 0.006). Yet here, frequency of internet use mattered even more: across groups, regular users were almost nineteen times more likely to seek out health-related information (AOR: 18.85; p < 0.001).

Entrepreneurial aspirations tell a similar story. Simply living in an intervention area nearly tripled the odds of people aspiring to improve their livelihoods (AOR: 2.97; p = 0.012). Again, frequent internet users stood out: they were more than seven times more likely to imagine alternative economic futures for themselves (AOR: 7.19; p < 0.001).

What emerges is a consistent pattern. The programme mattered – being part of it or simply living in its orbit significantly increased the likelihood of positive outcomes across learning, civic knowledge, health, and entrepreneurship. At the same time, habitual internet use cut across all domains as the most powerful predictor, suggesting that digital practice itself, once embedded in daily life, becomes a driver of wider attitudinal change.

Challenges and the road ahead

Wi-Fi access and digital instruction are, of course, not magic bullets. Socio-structural hurdles still exist, even with Internet Roshni. There is a complicated history of exploitation and discrimination behind the beautiful tea gardens. People who live in tea gardens have been watched over and governed in many different ways, including by colonial management boards, post-colonial political unions, government authorities, and development groups.

Even after many efforts, tea garden workers still face ongoing socioeconomic problems, such as gender discrimination, low pay, poor living and working circumstances, and little chances to move up in the company. These problems get worse because people can't get reliable information, digital platforms, or state welfare programmes. Power cuts still happen often, and network signals are generally weak in steep or isolated tea estate locations. Language is another problem. Many government websites and forms are only available in Bengali/Assamese, Hindi, or English, which a lot of tribal workers don't know how to read. These issues typically determine who may access and make use of the benefits of connectivity.

The evaluation shows some evidence to demonstrate how accessible internet, with support of SoochnaPreneurs, can bring changes and tackle some of these issues. Of course, usage of internet and online world have their loopholes, might have negative effects on their identity, but such integrated developmental approach in the field of ICT4D can create pathways to dignity, opportunity, and essential state services.

With right interventions, it may enable someone to watch online tutorials to upgrade her skills; a student can attend a virtual class; a tea garden worker can check her pension account; and an entire village can use social media groups to crowdsource or share ideas to tackle everyday hurdles in tea gardens.

If Digital India is to be more than just an infrastructure project, policy must go beyond fibre and apps. It needs to implement in manner so that it creates human resource: through training, community facilitators, and content that makes sense in local languages and contexts. The findings of this evaluation aligns with those experts who argues for treating broadband like electricity: universally available, subsidised, locally managed, and surrounded by human support.

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