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

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.

I have visited very few Indian government sites, but the list does include indianvisaonline.gov.in. Some have been horribly confusing, but some haven't. I did manage to get my Visa, complete with 17ish identical confirmation emails (I've forgotten the exact number). One common theme was that to me they looked old, and information dense.

I'm not against old-looking websites with lots of text. If done well, I think I even prefer it to nice looking modern pages with almost no information on them. We are, after all, having this discussion on HN.

The websites of Japanese mobile providers strike me as similar (I don't have any experience with Japanese government webpages, or probably any other Japanese websites). I found some of those had a similar vibe, which seemed very dated to me, however, I assumed that was a style choice rather than being old. Could be something similar going on for Indian sites. They're just not targeted at my design sensibilities.

As an addition, I thought most of the confusingness about indianvisaonline.gov.in wasn't in the web-design, but in the questions. I've found similar frustrating options on some lovely looking websites, or even paper forms. When forms are for important things, extra effort should be put in to make them as clear and obvious as possible. Perhaps the general rule for our current situation would be that the more important the form, the less intuitive it is. The Indian government isn't alone in this.

Does anyone have hopes AI will make things better for us in this area?

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)

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.

>Bureaucrats do not need AI to fall victim to cognitive surrender.

That is true. Organizations have long been surrendering cognitively to outsourcing, consulting, and brand names. They buy systems they do not understand and delegate requirements they cannot verify. Then, rather than reducing existing problems, new ones simply emerge.

It is not so much about bureaucracy as it is about the factionalism that commonly appears in organizations behind these types of websites. In the end, avoidance of responsibility becomes the primary imperative of the program. The core issue is that there needs to be one person who takes responsibility, but no one does, because no one thinks about the planning that oversees the entire UX. Someone must take responsibility for the UX flow, and this is the typical pattern that emerges when no one does.

This is so very inaccurate. Sure, not all websites are good, but the main ones are pretty good. For example, the Income tax website is much faster, more responsive, and has a better UI/UX.

Same with digilocker.

- 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

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.

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

Economist runs an anti-India agenda which is very clear from the positions they take. A functional but not so aesthetic website design is equated to failure of indian "officialdom", poor productivity/ skills. Looks more like a driven by need to make anti india content than an objective analysis of govt websites around the world.

Whoever at the economist decided to post their usual bait-slop garbage to HN chose the wrong article. People here love when clicking edit opens a new page and the spacing is 1.5pt.

Seriously though, it becomes a problem when under the tiniest load it crashes between page loads losing state when the server restarts.

But I mean, the reason is rather obvious. Many things are built via the tender system. You're entirely depending on the altruism of the lowest bidder. Things which were built with a better procurement process are good.

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.

Seems like The Economist can´t either