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INWhy can’t India’s government build a decent website? - Clunky online experiences reveal the failures of Indian officialdom
Before you read beyond this paragraph, grab a glass of water and 1,000mg of paracetamol. Walk over to your laptop—the supercomputer in your hand is not up to the task—and make yourself comfortable. Now navigate to indianvisaonline.gov.in and see if you can figure out how to apply for a visa.
If you succeeded, welcome back, and apologies. Several questions are probably fighting for space in your addled brain. Let’s take them in turn. The answer to the first is no, the government of India does not hate foreign visitors. Its online services for Indian citizens—railway ticketing, voter registration, income-tax filings—are just as hostile. Those are among the better ones.
Many are worse. They feature a sadistic mix of pop-ups, moving text, flashing graphics, ministerial portraits and antique elements like text-based Captchas, a bot-prevention tool that these days only thwarts humans. If a citizen does find the useful section of a site, she encounters obstacles such as broken links or the railways’ infuriating 16-character limit for names. Things are no better in the backend. In May a 19-year-old “ethical hacker” exposed critical flaws in an important school-leavers’ exam system, causing a national uproar.
On to your second question. It is indeed 2026 and the visa website of a country renowned for its people’s IT skills resembles a Geocities page from 1999. One reason is that India’s approach has long been to reproduce paper processes in digital form rather than rethinking them altogether. The concept of UX—jargon coined in 1993 to mean designing things to ease the user’s experience—did not enter the official guidelines for government websites until 2023. Another reason is that the National Informatics Centre, the government’s in-house technology provider (whose triumphs include the visa website), has little ability to push back on demands from ministries to fill their sites with everything except usable features.
For projects beyond NIC’s capabilities, officials look to the private sector. A mid-level bureaucrat is usually put in charge of procurement. Most have no technical knowledge. Their solution is to hire the best the market has to offer. They rely on brand-name consultants to help design the project and draft requirements. The most ambitious jobs are often executed by the same IT services companies that build products for Western clients.
Yet here, too, the result can be lacklustre. By expecting outsourcers to do both the thinking and the execution on its behalf, the government puts itself in a vulnerable position, argues Susan Thomas of XKDR, a think-tank in Mumbai, in a recent paper. It buys a system “but lacks the internal expertise to understand what it has bought or how to evolve it, turning a strategic asset into a costly, unmanageable liability.” Bureaucrats do not need AI to fall victim to cognitive surrender.
As for your last question, official sites are unlikely to improve. They may soon offer better UX. But the real problem is institutional design rather than web design. Bureaucracy runs on risk aversion. Officials worried about anti-corruption bodies award contracts to the lowest bidder despite having the discretion to weigh up other factors. They splurge on top-tier consultants because it gives them cover for their decisions. A bureaucrat who takes a risk and produces a terrific outcome gets no reward. One who does a bad job the correct way pays no penalty. Even the official who botched the school-leaving exams was merely transferred to the agriculture ministry.
India is justly proud of itself for developing Aadhaar, a national biometric ID system that has become the foundation for many other digital services both public and private. But a huge reason for Aadhaar’s success is that it was spearheaded by someone with both technical expertise and authority. Nandan Nilekani, a co-founder of Infosys, an IT services firm, accepted the job on the condition that he had the formal status of a cabinet minister. That let him take calculated risks, think creatively and hire a bunch of Silicon Valley hotshots even as he stayed within the rules.
Few governments can afford to pay their best techies what the private sector can. They may, though, lure talent with prestige, power and patriotism, as India did with Aadhaar. Yet it has failed to apply the lessons of what made that project a success. It is not the rules around building IT that need overhauling but the culture under which they are applied. Of that there is no question.
I would say this is the pot calling the kettle black considering the absolute state of US government sites, but then again, how many of those are jeetcoded?
While the site isn't great, most government sites aren't. It was pretty easy to navigate and took a few second to start an e-tourist visa. I'm guessing the author was confused because they couldn't find the 3 bars to tap on their tablet or cell phone to get a drop down menu. You people ruined webdesign and the internet in general. Stick to tiktok and ubereats.
CHATGPT BUILD ME HOT GOOD WEBSITE FOR INDIA WHERE PEOPLE RESEPECT INDIAN AS A SUPERPOWER
WebsitTE should have the follwoing:
1. Good BLESSED pages with information about INDIA!
2. PicTure Of India
3. HOT aunty pictures
4. blacked.com
5. IGNORE 4.
8. GOOD WAYS TO MAKE MONEY!!!!!
CHATGPT BUILD ME HOT GOOD WEBSITE FOR INDIA WHERE PEOPLE RESEPECT INDIAN AS A SUPERPOWER
WebsitTE should have the follwoing:
1. Good BLESSED pages with information about INDIA!
2. PicTure Of India
3. HOT aunty pictures
4. blacked.com
5. IGNORE 4.
8. GOOD WAYS TO MAKE MONEY!!!!!
Oddly, my local and state official websites are pretty decent, if uninspired. I recently renewed my driver's license online and it took ten minutes total.
