Reducing or Reproducing Inequality? A Critical Analysis of the Gender and Sustainability through Problematizing Digital Policies in India

This study critically examines India’s Gender Digital Divide (GDD) through Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ (WPR) framework, exploring how digital inclusion initiatives, framed around empowerment narratives and sustainability agendas reinforcing systemic inequalities. Moving beyond access-driven metrics and data-driven analytics, the evaluation shows how policy discourses privileged technocratic solutions and neoliberal logics, which may marginalise grassroots innovations, silence alternative framings and overlook intersectional realities of women’s digital exclusion in developing economies. The study highlights contradictions in sustainability narratives discovering a plurality of sustainability definitions, where digital inclusion is promoted as a solution, but fails to address deeper inequalities for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a complex socioeconomic context. The findings contribute directly to the advancement of policymaking strategies for SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) specifically as it deals with the gendered inequalities in digital governance to promote strategies for advocating socially responsive and globally sustainable policy design.