Closing the Last-Mile Digital Divide: Capability and Opportunity Barriers to Digital Government Access Among India's Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) and Pathways to Inclusion

Yamuna Kilaru; G Steeven Raju

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i05.88436

Closing the Last-Mile Digital Divide: Capability and Opportunity Barriers to Digital Government Access Among India's Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) and Pathways to Inclusion

Author(s)	Dr. Yamuna Kilaru, Dr. G Steeven Raju
Country	India
Abstract	India's digital governance architecture anchored in Aadhaar, the India Stack, and over 596,000 Common Service Centres has been widely credited with extending public services to hundreds of millions of citizens. Yet this progress has largely bypassed the country's 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs), an estimated 28–45 lakh (2.8–4.5 million) individuals characterised by geographical isolation, pre-agricultural livelihoods, and extremely low literacy. This paper applies the Capability-Opportunity-Motivation-Behaviour (COM-B) model and the “last-mile” framework articulated in the World Bank's 2026 report The Behavioral Dividend to examine why digital government services fail to reach and retain PVTG users even where infrastructure notionally exists. Restricting the analysis to Capability and Opportunity barriers, the paper identifies cognitive overload, oral-language and script exclusion, and low functional and digital literacy as capability-side constraints, and connectivity gaps, device unaffordability, documentation and Aadhaar-linkage failures, service fragmentation, weak support channels, and institutional distrust as opportunity-side constraints. Drawing on the behavioural toolkit of Behavioural User Journey Mapping and evidence from Indian programmes such as BharatNet, the Common Service Centre-Village Level Entrepreneur (CSC-VLE) network, the Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AePS), and the Pradhan Mantri Janjati Adivasi Nyaya Maha Abhiyan (PM-JANMAN), the paper proposes capability-building and opportunity-enhancing solutions tailored to habitat-level PVTG realities, culminating in an integrated, PVTG-specific Behavioural User Journey Map and policy recommendations for converting India's digital dividend into a genuine behavioral dividend for its most marginalised citizens.
Keywords	last-mile digital divide; Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups; COM-B model; digital government; behavioural user journey mapping; India; digital inclusion
Field	Sociology > Economics
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 5, September-October 2026
Published On	2026-09-26
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i05.88436

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Closing the Last-Mile Digital Divide: Capability and Opportunity Barriers to Digital Government Access Among India's Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) and Pathways to Inclusion

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