After a recent attempt to process a document on another government site for the 10th time - unsuccessfully - I was wondering why it is so hard. What was the developer thinking when building a workflow?
There was a 500 KB limit on the document size, while also having a very specific 2130 X 1346 resolution required for the image.
Why?
Then something occurred to me. I have yet to come across a government site that is not a form. This is true of every country where I have had to engage with a government website.
Every single government site is always a form.
In India, we regularly use government websites for Income tax, GST, Aadhaar, Driver’s License, Passport, and Voter’s ID. But even beyond this, birth/death certificate, stamp papers, duty payment and the list goes on.
Every single site is a glorified Form.
Someone figured out how to make a form online in 1992. Why are we still sucking at it?
None of these forms has any elaborate back-end computation. No AI. Not like you are uploading a picture and AI figures out the rest.
It is just a form which often does not even validate for data type. You can type text in the phone number field.
Question 1 - Why do we spend hundreds and thousands of crores to build websites that are merely forms?
Question 2 - Why do they not work?
In India, all of the government sites are either designed by TCS or Infosys. Why can’t our IT behemoths deliver decent forms??