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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.
Here’s what does my brain in: there are so many examples of good website UX around that even a half-assed consultant can just rip off a good visa site and sell that. Fuck knows they travel enough to first world countries to use good visa sites.
I went through a concrete example in the India Menace thread. The TL;DR version is that wherever you are, there will be basic use cases for searching court judgments. There is even a global collaboration called LII to build free resources for a country. Courts in the Commonwealth (which includes India) share best practice all the time. Any law student, librarian or lawyer can tell you the very simple things you need to be able to search on, and point to dozens of very similar, stable examples. There is really no excuse for building a shitty search interface for cases.
The large Indian court I tried to search on managed to do so.
It’s like building a car with square wheels in 2026. Why the ever loving fuck would you not just use the same solution everyone else does for a fairly simple problem? Utterly bewildering.
I actually went through the visa process to India a while back using that website for a business trip.
It felt incredibly shady and had a lot of spelling mistakes and bad grammar.
I specifically remember that when you completed the payment of the visa fee, you were greeted with a message similar to this:
"Thank you for payment !!!"
When the visa was done, my inbox was flooded with several messages similar to:
"hello good morning sir may i close this support ticket ??"
It’s like building a car with square wheels in 2026. Why the ever loving fuck would you not just use the same solution everyone else does for a fairly simple problem? Utterly bewildering.
they pay their cousin big sums of money, and in turn their cousin hire a peasant who learn it through bullshitting and promises them that their izzat and prestige will grow if they are willing to take this project for the price of prata.
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?
Hasn't changed in the last decade. Jeet coders are still incompetent as fuck.
And everyone can tell they suck because Silicon Valley flooded the tech industry with jeets and now software is getting worse and every website is glitchy as hell. Jeets fault.
Hasn't changed in the last decade. Jeet coders are still incompetent as fuck. Ver archivo adjunto 9221552
And everyone can tell they suck because Silicon Valley flooded the tech industry with jeets and now software is getting worse and every website is glitchy as hell. Jeets fault.
Keep in mind the media isn't going to survey how shitty retarded pajeets are every single year, year-after-year. When India breaks the 50% mark for engineer competency in a couple centuries we'll throw a victory party.
So far from 2017-2022 the estimate is that somewhere between 5-10% of Indian engineers are capable at writing software. Not really something to brag about when 90-95% of your "educated" Jeets are frauds, retarded or just plain bad at the job. I doubt much has changed in the last few years. India's still a massive shithole.
It’s like building a car with square wheels in 2026. Why the ever loving fuck would you not just use the same solution everyone else does for a fairly simple problem? Utterly bewildering.
I highly recommend you never look into their Arjun 2 domestic MBT program. The whole thing wound up like their code: features copy-pasted from all over with zero comprehension or understanding as to what they do or what the original intent was.
Indians being shipped back to India oftentimes kill themselves, which I don't think even niggers from the most vile shithole in Africa do when they're being deported back.
