Dept. of Mass Communication, Jagannath International Managment School, New Delhi, India.
The paper attempts to analyse the nature of digital divide in India and its debilitating impact on the use of new media by the citizens to communicate in the public domain with a view to participating in the life of the nation-community. The paper reveals that digital gaps have a tendency to emerge along the contours of connectivity, content, capacity and infrastructure. The paper goes on to maintain that at the international level 80% of the global population living in developing countries and receiving only 20% of the global income is deprived of the all empowering benefit of new media as these people have access to only 10% of the telecommunication infrastructure. At the national level, the disparity between the haves and have-nots is all the more marked because of factors like technological development, language and literacy, financial factors and other socio-cultural factors. The paper argues that if people are to be empowered by the new media technology, then affordable access to it has to be ensured. This calls for recognition of citizens’ right to communicate as a basic human right.
