Is this really still in effect?
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
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.
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.
If this is the parlous state of both the government and the bureaucracy, then I suspect that growth will be hampered.
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.
This proposal is just one way of destroying their call centres and any Internet based transaction system they may want to develop with the outside world.
You might also want to note the following:
Don't forget the following kicker: These are all excellent ways of destroying their IT industry, which is currently about 7% of total GDP. No organization with critical data who have any sense will transmit data over these sort of links.