From ICT Literacy to AI-Ready Empowerment: An Explainable Fuzzy AHP–TOPSIS Framework for Women’s Digital Inclusion in Chhattisgarh

Jyoti Bala Gupta; Sadhana Sharma; Ashish Kumar Pandey

From ICT Literacy to AI-Ready Empowerment: An Explainable Fuzzy AHP–TOPSIS Framework for Women’s Digital Inclusion in Chhattisgarh

Author(s)	Dr. Jyoti Bala Gupta, Ms. Sadhana Sharma, Dr. Ashish Kumar Pandey
Country	India
Abstract	Digital empowerment is increasingly a prerequisite for meaningful participation in AI-enabled education, public services, employment, and civic life. Yet technology-oriented training can produce uneven benefits across different dimensions of empowerment. This study develops an explainable hybrid Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (F-AHP)–Fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (F-TOPSIS) framework to evaluate women’s digital empowerment using evidence from selected ICT training programmes in Korba district, Chhattisgarh, India. The empirical base comprises 150 women trainees and 50 instructors and evaluates seven dimensions: technological, educational, economic, psychological, social, personal, and political empowerment. F-AHP is used to derive criterion importance under linguistic uncertainty, while F-TOPSIS estimates each dimension’s relative closeness to an ideal empowerment condition. To strengthen interpretability, the paper adds cross-method rank agreement and rank-margin diagnostics using the reported model outputs. Technological empowerment records the highest F-AHP weight (0.187) and F-TOPSIS closeness coefficient (0.822), followed by educational (0.804) and economic (0.778) empowerment. The AHP and TOPSIS orderings show very strong agreement (Spearman ρ = 0.964; Kendall τ = 0.905), while the smallest adjacent TOPSIS margin occurs between psychological and social empowerment (0.012), indicating that middle-rank ordering should be interpreted cautiously. The resulting framework is positioned as an explainable decision-support tool for inclusive digital-skills programmes and AI-readiness planning rather than as a causal measure of empowerment. The study contributes a transparent pathway from ICT training evaluation to responsible, inclusion-oriented AI governance and digital citizenship.
Keywords	Women Empowerment; ICT Education; AI Readiness; Fuzzy AHP; Fuzzy TOPSIS; Explainable Decision Support; Digital Inclusion; Chhattisgarh.
Field	Computer > Artificial Intelligence / Simulation / Virtual Reality
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 5, September-October 2026
Published On	2026-10-11

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From ICT Literacy to AI-Ready Empowerment: An Explainable Fuzzy AHP–TOPSIS Framework for Women’s Digital Inclusion in Chhattisgarh

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