The Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) was registered in Delhi, India, on December 16, 2002; its founder, Osama Manzar, has a background in physics. In his words, DEF was never a digital foundation, but a communication-based organization that uses digital as a tool and a medium. Its best-known approach is the SoochnaPreneur ("information entrepreneur") program, launched in 2016 with seed funding from a Qualcomm program to expand wireless access, and supported over the years by partners including the European Union, Nokia and Google. Rather than building computer rooms or centers in villages, DEF finds someone in the village who is willing to do the work, teaches them digital skills, gives them a printer and a tablet, and leaves the rest to them to run as a business; one SoochnaPreneur in Assam's tea gardens, for example, corrects errors on ID registrations, opens bank accounts, serves as the village's cash-withdrawal point and helps children submit scholarship applications. One shopkeeper in DEF's book did the math: making the trip to the district town to get one card — fares, photocopies and a lost day's wages — came to about 700 rupees; he offered to do it for 30. The time this business saves people is its income, so it can keep going without subsidies. By the organization's own 2026 website figures, the network has about 2,000 community information centers and 10,000 digital foot soldiers across 25 states and more than 250 districts, and has reached more than 35 million people over 23 years; the book DEF published in 2025 gives 2,200 SoochnaPreneurs in 26 states instead. The two sets of figures don't match, and both are self-reported. The approach has its limits. Among the Toda tribe in the Nilgiri hills, the mountains broke up the signal and the first center couldn't stay afloat — DEF itself wrote that the area had been left "digitally stranded." What worked in the end was two women splitting the job: one took on the work that has to be done in person, the other moved to a spot with signal to handle online applications. Smartpur, a project in the Nuh district of Haryana, shut down around 2024, but its spokes, designed from the start as self-sustaining micro-businesses, survived — negotiating bandwidth with operators and repairing broken lines on their own. At one shop there, opened in 2018, the owner, Mustakeem, added a second screen on the counter facing the customer, so people could watch how their own transaction was being handled; his WhatsApp group became the place where the village checks whether something is "a new subsidy or a new scam." A biometric scanner can find dormant accounts and screen out false claimants — and, in the wrong hands, be used to cheat people. In Chanderi, sari weavers learned the JacDraw loom software after a 2009–2012 project had ended, and by 2025 the number of handlooms had grown from fewer than 3,500 before the pandemic to 5,500. The book's yardstick: don't measure by project cycles and burn rates, but by what the community keeps choosing after the money recedes. In 2016, DEF submitted recommendations on public Wi-Fi to India's telecom regulator, TRAI, and says several of them were written into the national public Wi-Fi framework of 2020 — this is the organization's own account; government documents don't name it.
