Digital Setu: Bhimdhunga Digital Divide Storymap
Overview
An interactive storymap documenting digital infrastructure, access patterns, and community perspectives in Bhimdhunga, Nagarjun. It sets official coverage statistics against household-level stories (interviews, photographs, and spatial data) to show the gap between what the numbers say about connectivity and how residents actually experience it.
Built in a team during the All In Solutions fellowship, 2025.
Approach
- Mixed methods: household interviews plus infrastructure mapping
- Community-centered: residents’ own accounts drive the narrative, not extracted data points
- Visual-first: minimal text, multimedia story points on an interactive map
- Offline-first: plain HTML/CSS/JS with no external dependencies, so it can be demonstrated and shared in the low-connectivity areas it documents
What the Stories Show
Coverage maps make Bhimdhunga look reasonably connected. The interviews complicate that: connectivity is intermittent, affordability and digital literacy constrain access more than infrastructure does, most internet use is mobile-only, and access runs through community and household networks more than individual subscriptions.
Reflection
What worked: community participation gave the narrative its authority; the visual approach crossed language barriers; offline-first design meant residents could actually view and share the thing.
What I’d change: more quantitative visualization to pair with the stories, a temporal dimension (how access has changed), and a way for residents to update it without me.