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

6/29/2026 at 1:39:31 AM

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.

by anigbrowl

6/29/2026 at 6:13:49 AM

Did you try using it?

I’ve applied for evisas to India multiple times, it’s extremely buggy and many times you’ll have to start again from the beginning… additionally, their payment processing is often not functional so you have to keep retrying the payment…

Once the visa is applied for, the process is usually quick.

by Gud

6/29/2026 at 1:09:13 PM

I had a similar experience last year applying for an evisa. I think pay off the issue was related to the pages timing out before the extremely slow server somewhere in India could process the query and respond. My relatives on their iPads and few year old mid-range dell Inspirons could not manage and had to consult me for help.

by heroiccocoa

6/29/2026 at 12:54:35 PM

I never had a problem with applying for an evisa myself - including stopping midway and using the resumption token thing. There was an awful lot of stuff to fill out, but thats a legal thing, not a web design thing.

I do remember feeling the payment process was a little sketchy, but it worked alright

by RugnirViking

6/29/2026 at 2:13:03 AM

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/

by HexDecOctBin

6/29/2026 at 12:08:36 PM

Imo, UX4G looks dated af too.

by fakedang

6/29/2026 at 12:44:18 PM

Clarity and predictability is more important than modernity when serving 1.5 billion diverse people.

by HexDecOctBin

6/29/2026 at 2:08:00 AM

It was a functional website that I could navigate easily!

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

by awakeasleep

6/29/2026 at 6:14:27 AM

Did you try to apply for a visa? It’s a horribly buggy form

by Gud

6/29/2026 at 4:53:10 AM

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?

by red369

6/29/2026 at 2:20:20 AM

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.

by osti

6/29/2026 at 4:37:54 AM

>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.

by jdw64

6/29/2026 at 1:50:38 AM

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)

by tremolvod

6/29/2026 at 2:19:05 AM

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.

by samarthr1

6/29/2026 at 12:38:13 AM

https://archive.is/xtxHr

by Avicebron

6/29/2026 at 9:34:33 AM

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.

by FuturisticLover

6/29/2026 at 3:03:14 AM

- 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

by vivzkestrel

6/29/2026 at 3:05:42 AM

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.

by dominotw

6/29/2026 at 12:14:29 PM

TCS hires mediocre people because of cheap labor, which fits their outsourcing business model very well. Indian government tenders usually go to the cheapest bidder, not the most practical one. Because of this, even reputed companies like BCG have had to basically offer work for peanuts to secure government contracts away from the competition.

My banker gave me good advice when it came to Indians - the first price is not the final price. Always be ready to offer a discounted price that looks like a bargain to the Indian buyer. It's alien to me but looking at my parents, I must agree.

by fakedang

6/29/2026 at 12:34:41 AM

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.

by andsoitis

6/29/2026 at 1:20:02 AM

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

by helpfulfrond

6/29/2026 at 1:25:11 AM

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.

by fakedang

6/29/2026 at 1:49:00 AM

Had to laugh at the disabled contextmenu.

Site is built with Bootstrap 5 fwiw.

by dwd

6/29/2026 at 2:21:13 AM

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

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

by samarthr1

6/29/2026 at 12:57:46 PM

one of the four buttons on the site literally reads "For eVisa by Bureau of Immigration, Apply here."

the other three buttons are other kinds of visas

by RugnirViking

6/29/2026 at 4:12:44 AM

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.

by Manjunath_dn

6/29/2026 at 1:00:07 PM

Don't know about any agenda but indian gov sites suck big time. Ux, functionality, stability, information flow - every thing is barely adequate

by rishav_sharan

6/29/2026 at 4:49:49 AM

I believe the kids these days call it 'race baiting'

by swhiffen

6/29/2026 at 2:03:34 AM

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.

by arjie

6/29/2026 at 2:19:33 AM

Seems like The Economist can´t either

by sumanep

6/29/2026 at 2:47:57 AM

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.

by SilverElfin

6/29/2026 at 12:45:31 AM

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

by panny

6/29/2026 at 1:44:36 AM

Speaking for yourself?

by brcmthrowaway

6/29/2026 at 6:38:38 AM

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.

by porridgeraisin