Women in informal economy work in Urban India

CSI Transactions on ICT, 2026

This paper moves the conversation on digitization beyond platform work. Domestic workers, street vendors, and tailors are not platformised, yet digital tools are already load-bearing in their livelihoods — for payments, client search, and skill acquisition. Based on a survey of 604 women informal workers across these three sectors in urban India, the paper introduces a Digital Confidence Index disaggregated across four domains: messaging, social media, search, and finance.

Two findings anchor the argument. First, a consistent language penalty for non-English readers holds across every domain except social media. Second, help-seeking emerges as a positive predictor of digital confidence, not a marker of deficiency, complicating standard literacy-gap narratives. The factors that shape confidence, language, personal device ownership, financial decision-making power, shift depending on the domain in question, suggesting that a single "digital skills" score obscures more than it reveals.

The more significant finding may be that confidence itself is relational rather than individual: it moves with family support, worker networks, and institutional mediators, not simply years of schooling. That has real implications for how quickly and cheaply confidence-building interventions could work, in the informal economy and in the wider services economy more broadly.

With Antara Rai Chowdhury and Neha Maria Verghese. Fieldwork and research supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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