Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

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OK, this is getting weird. Check out the front page:

http://www.dot.gov.in/

This is their "Department of Telecommunication"! But the site could have been slapped together by a 12 year old. It looks like an abandoned server - full of flashing "New!" images...

And down the bottom it says:

  This site can be best viewed at 800x600 resolution in IE 4.0/ Netscape 3.1 or above
  Copyright � 2002, Department of Telecommunications, India

Google has also blocked their custom search... looks like they are using Google without paying them so Google have cut off their access!

However, while this looks to be abandoned, the front page says that the last time it was updated was on 22nd May, 2012. Something seems very wrong with the Indian Government's IT department!

Edit: it's getting worse. Check out the contacts list:

http://www.dot.gov.in/rti/teldir.htm

They have government officials using hotmail acounts! But this isn't that old - they have Gmail accounts for officials. If that's not bad enough, the Legal Advisor for the Deputy Director General is using a Yahoo account and the actual Deputy Director General is doing the same!!!

Something is very, very wrong with the Indian Government's IT security.

National Informatics Center(http://www.nic.in/) is what's wrong with the IT in government here.

NIC acts as a complete "mean guard at the door" for anyone trying to get work in government. NIC insists on doing things "their way" or you just take "the highway".

Here is an example of a few thing we have to deal with every day. There is a small Java Swings app built by a government department which generates a few reports everyday. A few beauties:

- Hard coded mysql host(localhost), db name, username(root) and no password.

- Run it from command line(java -jar) and you can see a hellish amount of debugging statements scroll by(e.g. "I am here", "Inside Xyz.abc", "asdasdasd" etc). A lot of sensitive info is also printed out on the console that even, we vendors, might not be supposed to know.

- This app requires a 0777 permission on '/home' directory. Yes '/home', not '/home/<someuser>'

- If it's 1 minute past midnight there is absolutely no way to generate day's report. According to Cheif Programmer of that department this is a security feature. Oh wait, we just change the system date.

- When our project in-charge (politely) confronted this "Chief Programmer" about this he just said that I was lying and there is absolutely no problem in 'sudo chmod 777 /home'. "we do it all the time"

I know this because we have been working with the government on some quite big projects.

Most of the govt sites of india are in similar state. They are hardly ever updated. The main reason for this is the paperwork/legalese needed before a site can be revamped. Permissions have to be taken from various post holders. I have an email account that is given by govt college and the allotted space is 5Mb.

In that case, the Indian Government needs wholesale reform. And soon. If India wants to be a forerunner in the world of IT (which it's rapidly becoming) this is only going to cause massive problems.

The govt. was not responsible for the IT revolution, it was mostly just entrepreneurs taking advantage of the opportunity. Don't expect much help/facilitation from them. However, once it was clear that IT was a job creator, many state govt. did start promoting it; but the extent is still unclear to me.

I think you are misunderstanding where I'm coming from. While the government isn't driving IT growth in India, it is still able to hinder it fairly effectively. After all, it is the government that must legislate the IT industry and the bureaucracy that must administer these laws.

If this is the parlous state of both the government and the bureaucracy, then I suspect that growth will be hampered.

One of the reasons that IT took off in India was because it was not a sector recognized by the Indian govt. to be of any importance and was thus free from ridiculous laws that exist in other areas. Now that has changed, expect more boneheaded interference from them.

Came to say this.

The govts only contribution to IT was nothing. It's the best they could ever do. When it first started, back with modems which went to 14.4k, the fact that no one understood it or it's implications was the only reason it succeeded.

Otherwise the rent seekers or the security focused would have probably killed it at inception.

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