India is entering a new phase of digital adoption. The next 500 million people coming online will largely come from non-metro markets, bringing with them a fundamentally different set of values, constraints and digital starting points. Yet most product teams, however well-collaborated, are still building for the earlier users. Sales data shows the centre of gravity has shifted to non-metro markets, with smartphones and smart TVs now drawing close to half their sales from these regions rather than from the cities that built India’s first wave of digital products. Today, these markets are creating aspirations and demand of their own.
A vast range of products has been designed, built, tested and optimised for the metro user, urban, English-first and always connected. Many of these paradigms fail outright when extended to non-metro India, and the reason is a flawed starting assumption. That’s because India’s product industry has spent a decade diagnosing its talent problem the same way: as a collaboration gap between designers who can’t think about systems, and engineers who can’t think about users. The fix on offer has always been the same bridge programmes, cross-functional hiring, and design sprints bolted onto engineering teams. None of it has meaningfully closed the gap, because the gap was never the real problem.
While designers have largely focused on the urban user, engineers have often been driven to build products faster, at lower cost and for planned obsolescence. User insights are frequently gathered by one set of teams while product decisions are made by management far removed from the field. This traditional divide between the designer’s mindset and the engineer’s mindset often produces products that fail to address real user needs. The problem becomes even more pronounced when designing for non-metro India, where both designers and engineers often lack first-hand understanding of the people they are designing for.
Designing for India’s Tier 2 and smaller towns demands a fundamentally different understanding of users and their unique contexts. Consumers in these markets are highly aspirational but equally price-sensitive, evaluating long-term product value, durability, ease of servicing and return on investment rather than novelty alone. Regional languages, local dialects and varying literacy levels require interfaces, packaging, instructions and customer support to be multilingual, intuitive and often language-agnostic. Products are frequently shared across multiple generations within a family, making gender and age inclusivity and adaptability essential design considerations.
{{/usCountry}}Designing for India’s Tier 2 and smaller towns demands a fundamentally different understanding of users and their unique contexts. Consumers in these markets are highly aspirational but equally price-sensitive, evaluating long-term product value, durability, ease of servicing and return on investment rather than novelty alone. Regional languages, local dialects and varying literacy levels require interfaces, packaging, instructions and customer support to be multilingual, intuitive and often language-agnostic. Products are frequently shared across multiple generations within a family, making gender and age inclusivity and adaptability essential design considerations.
{{/usCountry}}Unlike metros, unreliable internet connectivity and infrastructure constraints, from narrow bandwidth to poor road networks, necessitate products that function reliably offline and withstand harsher operating environments. Purchase decisions are strongly influenced by community opinion and word of mouth, making trust, cultural sensitivity and local acceptance just as important as technical performance. Designers must cater to a wide spectrum of digital literacy through simple, symbolic and intuitive interactions while supporting multiple modes of engagement, such as cash alongside digital payments. Products also need to overcome a significant trust deficit towards new technologies by demonstrating transparency, reliability and familiarity, ensuring that innovation is not only technologically advanced but also socially accepted and easy to adopt. Like every design process, it starts with a deep-rooted empathetic understanding of the end users in non-metro locations.
That distinction matters because it changes the solution. If we think the problem is simply a gap between design and engineering, we’ll keep trying to bridge it. But the products actually succeeding in non-metro India, in fintech, agritech and health-tech, are not being built by teams that merely bridged design and engineering. They are built by teams that never separated the two in the first place. Form and function have to be solved together from day one.
Which raises a more fundamental question: are we educating Designers to think this way? Most design schools are located in or near metro cities, training students to be “Industry-Ready” rather than “Society-Ready.”
Fixing this requires more than a new elective. Field immersion must become mandatory because design cannot be learned in the classroom alone. Research should be context-driven, especially in a multi-ethnic and multicultural country like ours. Students need to learn by designing for the conditions people actually live with patchy internet, uneven infrastructure and devices shared by multiple family members. Design education should bring designers, engineers, and domain experts together from the start. While global influences remain important, a deeper understanding of “Design for India” is critical.
India’s growth over the next decade will come from its non-metro regions. The competitive advantage will not lie in cheaper products or better aesthetics, but in products that genuinely understand, appreciate and respond to the realities of these markets. To achieve that, we must train designers and engineers who can think beyond the metros and create products for India, driving the country’s next wave of growth.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Arun Bhardwaj, dean - foundation and product design, Pearl Academy.