Digital Empowerment for Digital India: A Tool to Measure

Abstract

The rapid development and distribution of digital media over the last two decades and access to this media has become crucial of being an active player in our contemporary society. The accessibility of the ICTs must be there because it is digital access which divides the society not the digital technology as technology integrates the society. So an effort is to be made to provide digital technologies to the members of the society. Simply providing access is not the only solution but also making the people empowered to use the digital technologies. Therefore, there is a need to know the digital empowerment status of the individuals by developing a tool. If the tool is not standardized and only applied then result will be questionable. Hence, a scale on digital empowerment has been developed based on summated rating (Likert technique). Digital empowerment is operationally defined as ‘a process through which an individual is making fit to the digital technology and harvesting the maximum potentials of the technology with reference to psychological, economical, legal and technical competency’. The scale consists of 38 items under the subcategory, namely, psychological (5 items), legal (3 items), economical (8 items) and technical competency (22 items) based on the critical ratio technique.