Representativeness in competitive exams is one of the several indicators of inclusivity in education. Is this an area where India is doing poorly, especially after a policy thrust towards the digitalisation of education? The data are suggestive. Only 11.16 lakh students, out of the 15 lakh who had filled out applications for the Common University Entrance Test this year, appeared for the examination, indicating an absenteeism of nearly 25%. Significantly, among students belonging to the scheduled tribes, the figure of absenteeism was almost as high as 50%, with about 52,500 students out of the 1.06 lakh applicants staying away from the test. The trend may not be universal. Other competitive exams conducted by the National Testing Agency, such as the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, see only 5% to 10% students miss their examinations. But there is a case to explore whether the high absenteeism among ST students in CUET is indicative of the persistent digital divide in Indian education. The hypothesis correlating students on the margins with digital exclusivity is not speculative: the spread of digital education and access to attendant infrastructure have been markedly uneven. The India Inequality Report 2022: Digital Divide by Oxfam reveals that only 31% of the rural population uses the internet, and a negligible 2.7% and 8.9% of the poorest households in India have access to a computer and internet facilities, respectively. Incidentally, educators have attributed the high rate of absenteeism among financially weak students from rural backgrounds in CUET to their diffidence to using computers. This is a compelling argument; it also shows that the yawning gap in digital education that was first revealed by the pandemic remains unaddressed. The consequences are manifold. Online education has led to drop-outs among poorer students apart from creating alarming, stubborn gaps in learning.

There is thus an urgent need to address the growing digital divide in education. But has the government been attentive? The distribution of laptops to students remains mostly limited to electoral populism. The larger structural challenges — poverty and the resultant inability to own digital devices, poor internet connectivity, sharing of a single device among multiple learners and so on — persist. The time for mouthing flowery rhetoric on digital literacy is past. Concrete, multidimensional policy action must follow to make digital education equitable, with a special focus on students from India’s hinterlands.