Inclusion In Tech Access Key To Digital Age: MeitY Secy

New Delhi: Ensuring greater inclusion in technology access is critical in today’s digital age, MeitY Secretary S Krishnan said on Friday, highlighting the growing concerns of exclusionary barriers such as language, regionality, age, and education, which hinder universal access to technology.

Krishnan, Secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), speaking on the occasion of Universal Acceptance Day 2025, said technology access is often taken for granted, and there are critical blocks in the path for democratising technology with impact from exclusionary barriers such as language, regionality, age, and education. “Fundamentally, we need to work towards greater inclusion, something which in the initial stages of popularising the internet was less of a concern, but now that it has become so popular, it is significantly more of a concern,” he said.

He stressed the need to simplify technology access and ensure that multilingualism is not a barrier, especially in a country as linguistically diverse as India. “We need to be much more inclusionary in the way that we operate and democratise technology, enable access to technology for a lot more people. And increasingly, as more of it is digital-driven and technology-driven, we have to ensure that people don’t get excluded by any kind of mean,” Krishnan noted. Universal Acceptance (UA) Day is a global initiative to promote the use of multilingual and inclusive internet technologies.