Challenges to Data Collection: Digital Divide Causing Double Marginalization of the Bagri Community in Sindh, Pakistan

Abstract

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, we conducted qualitative research on the Bagri community in Pakistan’s Sindh province. The Bagri community is considered an indigenous community in Pakistan’s Sindh and Punjab provinces. They also live in some states in India. The community has been referred to as ‘scheduled caste’ in Pakistan’s constitution. They speak Bagri language and practice Hinduism. Unfortunately, some Hindus and Muslims discriminate against the Bagri community and give them a wide berth and the community is seen as untouchable (Shah, 2007). Due to lockdowns caused by Covid 19, it has become difficult to access members of the community in order to collect data. Many of the members of the community have no digital literacy and the few who had mobile phones were contacted through mobile phone, but unfortunately voice quality of the interviews was not good and there was either network or noisy interruptions which made it difficult to understand what the interviewee was saying. Given this difficult situation, we used the strategy of using a friend of a friend to conduct the interviews on our behalf. However, even this solution faced challenges as the community was perceived as untouchable. In this way, the Bagri community was not only socially but also digitally marginalized. Therefore, this qualitative research will explore the digital and social challenges coresearchers faced during data collection, and we discuss how these challenges, were to some extent, surmounted.