Who makes government websites?
Bangalore, the city with the largest density of software engineers, has been touting its BBMP online services for years now.
You know what, BBMP? Half your websites don't work. Bloody hell, which of these fabled software engineers have you been using to create your dumbass websites?
Take the example of the Death Certificate online request form. I either have to take half a day to go in person to the office in Shivajinagar (by the way, I have to go to different offices for each parent... apparently the offices are ward specific and while requesting for a DC for one parent I cannot ask for the other one.... again, internet age? Hello? Isn't the whole effing point of putting things online so you don't have this nonsensical geographical restriction? Imagine if one of my parents had died in Whitefield... or Timbucktoo... I would have had to keep going there to pick up DCs every few months. Because you know what else? You can't order more than 5 at a time. Just shoot me somebody. Right now.)
So the online DC request: You enter your details... and you know while doing so, that there's going to be a problem because you cannot enter any spaces. So I have to type VarshaShridhar or my father's name without any spaces and hope to God that the thing figures out what has been entered.
Then, ok. You enter all the details and click submit. There's an interminable wheel that goes round and round and then abruptly stop... no loading of new page, no error message, nothing. So what is going on? God knows. The Page. Doesn't. Change. Ever.
The state run or the central govt websites are no better. In the GoI website, for example, you are supposed to somehow be born figuring out that a grant application website that doesn't open in Google Chrome might magically do so in Firefox. Many grant applications through BIRAC, for example, do not allow you to change the data in a form without resetting a bunch of other pages. So imagine you are putting in a budget for a grant. As you change your budget, all your milestones and timelines change as well. So instead of a change of a single line, you now have to spend the next 45 minutes retyping (or copy-pasting) the previous 4 pages of content.
Government guys, I know my company website isn't the greatest. But for all the flak it's gotten, at least it works. And I did on a near-zero budget. Tell me, how many crores of rupees of taxpayer money did you spend on these crappy websites?
1 comment:
Government websites are so because of a systemic lack of accountability and extreme short-sightedness. The tender process probably selects the lowest bidder who can barely build a functioning website. To make someone build good software you have to be ready to spend a lot of money. Also good software needs continuous maintenance. It is therefore imperative to build a good team of on-site developers for an organization like the government.
https://www.nic.in/ is an attempt at that. Unfortunately, the quality of many of their products is also questionable.
If we keep questioning "why?" we will have to uncover the harsh realities of tech education in this country. I think that's better left untouched at the moment.
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