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Last week, I was in Mumbai at the launch of RATI Foundation's Ideal Internet Report 3.0. And somewhere between the data and the anecdotes, I found myself returning to a question that has shaped much of my reporting on gender and tech in India:

Who is the internet actually built for?

If the report is any indication, it’s definitely not for most Indian teens using it.

The report surveyed 1,277 teenagers across urban affluent, urban low-income, and rural low-income settings. What emerges is not one "Indian child online" but many—navigating radically different digital realities shaped by class, gender, and geography. And the gaps between what platforms assume and what teens actually experience aren't just wide. They're structural.

The Phone That Was Never Theirs

Let’s start with devices, the holy grail of “access.” 

Sixty-two percent of teens in the study use shared phones. Of these, another 62% have to ask permission every single time they want to go online. For rural low-income girls, that number jumps to 73%.

This isn’t an unfamiliar statistic. I saw this play out in real time during the pandemic when I reported on teenage girls who were pulled out of school and pushed into marriage—because the only phone in the house went to their brother. Online classes became a gendered infrastructure overnight. The boys logged in. The girls disappeared.

The report confirms what I witnessed then: even basic mobile phones in rural areas are gendered assets. Among rural teens with access to feature phones, only 20% of boys owned them. Not a single girl did. All of them used borrowed devices, mostly owned by male family members.

Device ownership isn't just about having a gadget. It's about autonomy, privacy, and the ability to learn without surveillance. When you don't own your device, you don't control your digital life.

Safety Features For Imaginary Users

Then there’s the question of how teens use the internet — and how platforms imagine they do.

Ninety-five percent of teens in the study have installed apps. But only 15% have ever refused a permission request. Most just tap “Allow.” And while 82% know how to change a password, only 18% say they’ve never shared one.

This isn’t recklessness. It’s logistics. If your brother needs your phone, your cousin knows your password, your schoolwork lives on your mother’s device, password hygiene becomes a group project.

But platforms design for single-user, English-speaking, privacy-conscious teens with personal email IDs. The reality? Only 50% of surveyed teens had their own email. Among rural low-income teens, that dropped to 28%. 

Without email, account recovery is nearly impossible. So forget two-factor authentication even “Forgot Password?” becomes a dead end.

At Decode, we had reported on West Bengal's student smartphone scheme, where kids got devices but didn't know how to email. They could scroll Instagram and watch YouTube, but formal digital literacy—the kind that builds agency—was absent. A device had been delivered. Access had not.

Content Moderation in the Wrong Language

Then there's the question of what teens encounter online and whether platforms are equipped to protect them in languages they actually speak.

The report found that 51% of teens had been disturbed by violent content online. 44% by inappropriate imagery. 38% by cyberbullying. But reporting was rare. Among those upset by violent content, only 29% reported it. For inappropriate images, just 31%.

Why? Partly because reporting tools are often in English, designed for Western contexts, and disconnected from Indian teens' lived realities. But also because harm itself is normalised. Half the teens surveyed said violent content didn't bother them at all; it’s routine to find such content on their feeds.

Meanwhile, we've reported on Spotify hosting sexually explicit audio that Indian children can easily access— parental controls exist, but they don't work across languages, cultural contexts, or shared-device households. A safety filter that only understands English is not a safety filter for most of India.

The Gender Divide in Risk and Response

One of the report's starkest findings: girls consistently reported greater distress from online harms but were less likely to report them. Boys, even when less affected, escalated more often.

This mirrors what I found years ago while reporting on female PUBG players in India. They navigated the game like pros, but harassment was constant. Worse. They developed coping strategies—muting mics, using gender-neutral usernames, logging off early—but rarely reported abuse. The cost of speaking up often felt higher than the harm itself.

The RATI report shows this isn't unique to one platform. It's embedded in how girls experience the internet overall. Across content risks, violent imagery, hate speech, and inappropriate language, girls felt more distressed but took less formal action. The burden of harm was individual. The tools for redress were institutional. And the two never quite met.

There's the internet of urban affluent teens, who join Instagram in middle school, own laptops, ask AI to help with their homework, and have parents who discuss online safety. There's the internet of urban low-income teens, navigating on shared devices, seeking permission, using voice search, and learning digital skills through peers rather than schools. And there's the internet of rural low-income teens—especially girls—who access borrowed phones, lack email, rarely report harm, and are locked out of emerging tools before they even know they exist.

Platforms assume ideal users. Policy assumes uniform access. Safety features assume English fluency, single-user devices, and stable connectivity. But the real world is far more uneven. 

Until design catches up to that truth, until safety tools work for shared devices, until reporting mechanisms exist in regional languages, until email isn't a prerequisite for account recovery, until parental controls actually understand Indian households—every "ideal" internet we build will leave someone out.

And it will almost always be the same someones: girls, low-income teens, rural students. The ones who need the internet most, and are served by it least.

The question isn't whether Indian teens are online. They are. The question is: on whose terms?

On My Bookmarks

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