Why India’s Digital Push Is Leaving Its Oldest Citizens Behind

Sarita is 74. She lives alone in a faded but proud independent house in a Tier-2 city in north India. She has used mobile phones for years and has been a smartphone user for the past five. Every morning, she streams live bhajans. She navigates YouTube with ease and stays connected through WhatsApp calls with friends, children, and grandchildren.

And yet, her digital world stops there.

When an SMS arrives about her electricity bill, Sarita waits for her neighbour’s college-going daughter to “do the online thing.” For her, Digital India’s promise of independence has quietly turned into dependence—wrapped in unfamiliar icons, forgotten passwords, and the constant fear of pressing the wrong button.

Sarita is not an exception.

Millions of Indians aged 70 and above—part of a 150-million-strong elderly cohort—live with this daily tension between pride and helplessness. Many reside in tier-II and III cities, small towns, and villages where digital infrastructure has expanded rapidly but service design has largely ignored ageing bodies, weakening eyesight, slower reflexes, and deep-seated anxieties around technology.

Research consistently shows that seniors actively use phones for calls, WhatsApp, and videos, but stop short at bills, bookings, and banking. Tools that feel liberating to the young often feel hostile to them: cramped text, tiny fonts, buried menus, repeated authentications. They didn’t mind walking to the counter. They valued human conversations. Why, then, has that option quietly disappeared?

The stakes rise sharply in sectors like banking, insurance, and healthcare.

For decades, passbooks and branch visits meant control and independence.

Today, token kiosks make seniors feel invisible and rushed. Hospitals insist on online bookings, digital uploads, and portals—leaving a frail 74-year-old squinting at her phone at a crowded reception, hunting for an OTP or borrowing a grandchild’s device to access lab reports. Layer this with scam fears, low confidence, and confusing interfaces, and what you have is not innovation but exclusion.

This matters even more when you look at the numbers.

According to UNFPA projections, India’s elderly population will grow by 134% between 2022 and 2050. Those aged 80+ will grow by a staggering 279%. Often referred to as the ‘silver economy,’ this segment is already estimated at ₹73,082 crore and is expected to multiply rapidly in the coming years (NITI Aayog, 2024). Winning their trust is not just the right thing to do but it is smart business.

Some elder-care startups have begun to understand this. Mainstream service providers, however, still have much to learn.

Imagine banks that treat seniors as valued customers and not problems to be pushed online. Imagine hospitals and hotels with senior-first counters, where staff act as digital guides using on-site tablets, helping without snatching devices from their hands. What if apps offer a true ‘senior mode’—larger text, voice prompts, and simple flows. Imagine utilities with helplines where agents actually complete online payments or complaints on behalf of elderly customers.

A useful way to reframe this challenge is through a classic customer-experience lens.

For a 74-year-old in a Tier-2 city trying to pay a bill or book a hospital appointment, the “customer journey” is not a series of clicks. It is a sequence of emotions—anxiety, confusion, embarrassment, and finally relief when the task is done. Treating this as a designed journey forces organisations to ask, at every touchpoint: What does the senior see, hear, feel, and fear here—and how can we reduce that fear?

Companies serious about inclusion need to build a senior-citizen persona and test their services through that lens. Picture Rama, 74, a retired schoolteacher—independent, but anxious about technology, living alone. Now map her end-to-end experience for a single task: paying a utility bill or scheduling a diagnostic test. This requires deep qualitative research, but it is a necessary investment.

Once personas and journeys are mapped, cross-functional teams can identify pain points—tiny fonts, jargon, OTP stress, fear of fraud—and classify them as emotional or functional. If the core pain point is loss of control or dignity, solutions may lie in assisted-digital options, human callbacks, clearer communication, and reassurance cues that restore agency.

This turns “elder-friendly” from a slogan into a practical redesign agenda that marketers, product teams, and operations can act on.

As Professor Clayton Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done theory reminds us, customers don’t “hire” services for features alone. They hire them for emotional progress. For India’s 70+, the real job may not be “pay my bill online” or “book an appointment,” but something deeper: handle my affairs independently, with dignity.

In the end, the question for companies is simple. Will digital transformation widen the gap between the young and the old—or will it be used to close it?

The answer will be written quietly, in the lives of people like Sarita—whether they continue waiting in queues for someone younger to “do the online thing,” or whether service design finally allows them to stand back on their own feet. And the opportunity—for healthcare, banking, insurance, utilities, hospitality, and beyond—is enormous.