Why can't India's government build a decent website?

anigbrowl•about 2 hours ago

I visited the visa webs tie the article complained about. It was not very beautifully designed, but not especially awful either. This feels like one of those periodic Economist articles where the author vents about some personal grievance to fill up column inches during a slow news week.

HexDecOctBin•about 2 hours ago

The one big issue with Indian Government websites is that there is no single unified visual language, something that UX4G [1] is aiming to fix.

Other than that, I agree; this reads like the rantings of an young intern incapable of operating anything not built using whitespace-heavy "flat" interfaces.

[1] https://www.ux4g.gov.in/

awakeasleep•about 2 hours ago

It was a functional website that I could navigate easily!

I guess the “problem” was it didn’t use bootstrap icons

tremolvod•about 2 hours ago

I do think most government agencies are crap. The only one I have encountered good were UK ones and they have a pretty strong and interesting stack. They showed a talk at a MozFest where their compatibility went back to Next browser iirc. Due to the same reason though some of their relatively simple forms are multiple pages since from what I understand they don't allow "branching sections" in a single page

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik9IeChLqEk (think it was this one)

P.S. I think US is worse in every aspect. Try booking a US Visa appointment. Also as someone who has done both, Indian tax filing is significantly better as compared to the US where a government site doesn't exist. The worst offender in India was the driving license portal. (Older forms did use to be a weird excel UI and getting it to work on libre office was a nightmare I abandoned)

samarthr1•about 2 hours ago

Happy to share that the new parivahan portal is miles ahead!

It is a fully centrally funded and built system that makes the whole thing uniformly decent.

vivzkestrel•about 1 hour ago

- because they outsource to tcs

- tcs is the most mediocre software development company there is

- if they instead gave contracts to startups in bangalore / mumbai etc, they would do a far far better job at ui / ux

dominotw•about 1 hour ago

interesting you choose to address this at that level of chain .

like i could say, because tcs hires mediocre ppl on low pay if they hired ppl at higher pay their ux would be better.

but the real answer in both cases is why something is happening nto what is happening.

osti•about 2 hours ago

Is it only the Indian government? I don't think that's in any way unique to India, I've seen many poor government websites.

Avicebron•about 3 hours ago

https://archive.is/xtxHr

arjie•about 2 hours ago

The only places I recall seeing a marquee tag are Geocities, my 11th standard programming class in Chennai, and Indian government websites. I suspect the last two things are not unrelated.

sumanep•about 2 hours ago

Seems like The Economist can´t either

panny•about 3 hours ago

Brain drain. Anyone in India who knew how to build a website was H1B'ed a long long time ago.

brcmthrowaway•about 2 hours ago

Speaking for yourself?

andsoitis•about 4 hours ago

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.

helpfulfrond•about 3 hours ago

The scrolling text on the visa site is wild... Haven't seen that in forever.

fakedang•about 3 hours ago

Reminds me of my middle school HTML project in computer science. Ironically, my project (as an Indian) was a website for promoting tourism in Paris XD.

dwd•about 2 hours ago

Had to laugh at the disabled contextmenu.

Site is built with Bootstrap 5 fwiw.

samarthr1•about 2 hours ago

Heh, on my work laptop it did not take me much trouble?

ig I did not have the stress of actually needing it?

SilverElfin•about 1 hour ago

Corruption is what this looks like. The contracts are probably going to friends of politicians. It’s not hard to build a good website these days.

Why can't India's government build a decent website?

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