Why Digital Efficiency Becomes Social Exclusion for Seniors
Without assisted access and age-friendly systems, digitisation risks converting entitlement into exclusion for India’s elderly
A background note can be accessed here: APEC: Digital Empowerment for Seniors
Mohan Sai Dutt: Founder, Dock Consulting | Careerlee
SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being | SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure | SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities
Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology | Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment | Ministry of Health and Family Welfare
Seniors face exclusion not only from device ownership but from authentication hurdles, complex interfaces, and the absence of assisted access in essential services. What public interventions are most critical to prevent exclusion without over-engineering the welfare response?
Senior exclusion is driven less by device ownership than by system design failures: brittle authentication, multi-step OTP flows, poor readability, and the absence of assisted pathways when processes break. This matters at scale because official data shows that barely 13–15 percent of Indians aged 60+ have ever used the internet. A welfare state cannot treat digital confidence as a prerequisite for accessing pensions, rations, or healthcare.
The most effective policy intervention is not rolling back digitisation, but institutionalising assisted access through existing last-mile institutions. Common Service Centres (CSC), bank branches, post offices, and Primary Health Centres (PHC) should explicitly function as assisted digital service points for seniors. International practice reinforces this approach. In the UK, the Government Digital Service’s Assisted Digital Framework mandates offline and human-assisted alternatives for citizens unable to use digital services independently, ensuring inclusion without fragmenting systems.
In parallel, government platforms must adopt age-friendly design standards: larger fonts, simplified workflows, local language support, and clear escalation paths to human assistance. Digital systems must be designed with rule-based fallback mechanisms – such as manual verification or alternate authentication – that are auditable, digitally logged, and transparently confirmed via SMS or IVR. This protects seniors without reintroducing arbitrary decision-making or opportunities for misuse.
Most mainstream digital products are optimised for younger users, leaving seniors dependent on intermediaries. What market or regulatory incentives could encourage private firms to develop viable, niche digital solutions for older users in areas like banking, health, and communication?
Most private digital platforms exclude seniors not by intent; but by design choices optimised for speed, scale, and the assumed capabilities of younger users. In practice, minor app updates – smaller fonts, rearranged menus, or additional authentication steps – can abruptly push older users out of formal systems. Seniors then turn to informal intermediaries, increasing dependency and fraud risk. This reflects a design failure, not a lack of demand.
Policy can correct this by shaping incentives. Regulators should deploy targeted sandboxes focused on senior-specific use cases: voice-led interfaces, offline payments, simplified consent, and tightly governed caregiver delegation. Japan’s ageing-tech ecosystem illustrates how regulatory flexibility and public-private pilots can enable banks and service providers to adopt simplified and assisted models without weakening security.
Public procurement can reinforce these signals. Banks, hospitals, and telecom service providers partnering with the state should be rewarded for demonstrable senior usability in real-world conditions. A formal “Senior-Safe” certification – analogous to an ISI mark – could anchor trust. Certification criteria should include readable design, voice support, fraud alerts, cooling-off periods for high-value transactions, and rapid access to human assistance. When public institutions recognise and use such designs, firms have a clear incentive to invest in products for senior users.
As India’s population ages, persistent digital exclusion risks pushing seniors out of service access, and economic activity. How costly this may be for the economy and what can policymaking do to address them?
Digital exclusion of seniors carries tangible economic costs. Older citizens control pensions, savings, and a substantial share of household consumption. When digital systems feel unsafe or incomprehensible, seniors reduce their use of banking, e-commerce, and online services, dampening aggregate demand. In practice, many abandon digital payments entirely after a single failed transaction or unexplained interface change.
Exclusion also weakens service delivery efficiency. Seniors unable to navigate portals are pushed into repeated physical visits, queues, and agent-mediated workarounds. Departments then maintain parallel manual systems, increasing staff workload, delays, and error rates. In healthcare, difficulty accessing digital appointments or telemedicine often results in delayed care and avoidable emergencies, increasing long-term public costs.
A less visible cost is rising inter-generational dependency. Capable seniors become reliant on working-age family members for routine tasks, diverting productive time and income. Countries like Singapore have addressed this proactively through programmes such as Silver Infocomm, combining assisted onboarding, simplified interfaces, and confidence-building.
India should adopt a similar approach through a Silver Skills Mission embedded in CSCs, banks, post offices, and PHCs – aimed not at creating power users, but at enabling safe, dignified access to essential services.
Author:
Views are personal.