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India has spent a decade racing to wire its schools. The National Education Policy 2020 has digital learning as a cornerstone. And the numbers are impressive on the surface.

According to a NITI Aayog report, internet connectivity in government schools has jumped from a negligible 8 per cent in 2014-15 to 63.5 per cent in 2024-25. Computers are present in a growing number of classrooms. And among teenagers, smartphones are practically universal — 90.2 per cent of boys and 88.1 per cent of girls aged 14-16 have one at home, according to ASER 2024.

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So why is only 57 per cent of that generation using their phone to study?

The same ASER survey that reveals near-universal smartphone access also finds that 76 per cent of children who can operate a smartphone used it for social media in the reference week — while barely more than half used it for anything educational. The phone is in the hand. The learning isn’t happening.

The problem runs deeper than usage habits. Personal ownership tells a different story from household access. While nine in 10 teens have a smartphone somewhere at home, only 36.2 per cent of boys and 26.9 per cent of girls actually own one themselves.

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When ASER surveyors asked students to bring a phone with working connectivity to complete digital tasks, only 70.2 per cent of boys and 62.2 per cent of girls could. Access and autonomy are not the same thing — and for girls especially, the gap is significant.

Then there is the school side of the equation. Despite the decade-long push, over one-third of India’s 14.71 lakh schools still have no internet connection at all. The state-level disparities are glaring. Delhi, Andhra Pradesh and Chandigarh are near-universal.

West Bengal — one of India’s largest states — has connected just 18.6 per cent of its schools. Meghalaya is at 26.4 per cent. And then there is Karnataka: home to Bengaluru, India’s Silicon Valley, and yet only 50.7 per cent of its schools have internet access. The state that exports the world’s software cannot connect half of its own classrooms.

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Even where connectivity exists, the question of whether it is used for learning remains. The NITI Aayog report flags that “advanced digital integration is at an early stage of systemic adoption” — access has expanded, but pedagogical use is still thin. Teacher capacity to use digital tools in instruction is cited as a critical gap. A screen without a lesson plan is just a screen.

The gender gap

The gender dimension deserves a closer read. Girls match or nearly match boys on application-oriented tasks — browsing YouTube, sharing content, searching for information. But on foundational device skills, the gap opens up. Boys outpace girls by nine percentage points in setting an alarm (81.5 per cent vs. 72.4 per cent).

Digital safety awareness is markedly lower among girls: only 50.2 per cent know how to make a social media profile private, against 60.3 per cent of boys; just 50.1 per cent can change a password, compared to 65.4 per cent of boys. These are not trivial gaps in a world where children’s online safety depends on knowing how to protect themselves.

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India’s digital education story, as this report tells it, is one of infrastructure running ahead of use. The hardware is arriving. The connectivity is spreading. But the pedagogical ecosystem — trained teachers, structured digital curricula, safe and equitable access — is still catching up. Until it does, the smartphone in every home remains more social than educational.