Bridging the digital divide: community resilience in educational access during the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing educational inequalities in India, particularly for students in government-funded schools with limited access to digital infrastructure. This paper examines the processual nature of resilience in bridging the educational digital divide during the COVID-19 pandemic in TPuri (pseudonymized), a low-income community in the National Capital Region of India. Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and observations, the study highlights how resilience is not a static attribute but an evolving process, shaped by human infrastructure – a network of teachers, parents, Civil Society Organization (CSO) workers, and community volunteers. As digital exclusion widened inequalities, these actors engaged in adaptive and iterative strategies, leveraging self-organization, redundancy, and flexibility to ensure continued access to education. While government policies failed to account for resource constraints in marginalized communities, resilience materialized through everyday infrastructuring, where informal tutoring networks, WhatsApp-based coordination, and peer-driven digital literacy efforts enabled learning. By foregrounding resilience as a dynamic and context-specific process, the findings challenge techno-solutionist approaches and emphasize the need for community-centered, adaptable policy frameworks that acknowledge the lived realities of underserved communities. This research contributes to critical discussions on equity, digital education, and grassroots resilience in crisis settings.