KASARGOD: The Animal Husbandry Department’s effort to streamline its farmer-centric activities went for a toss as a suspected Pakistani group hacked its interactive website www.ahdk.gov.in.
Three weeks after the incident, the website is still down and the data collected by field officers are piling up, said officers.
“The website has been hacked and is not available on the internet. But we have made it available on Kerala State Wide Area Network (KSWAN), the core common network infrastructure for e-governance and state information infrastructure,” said Balachandran, the department’s IT officer, over phone from Thiruvananthapuram.
KSWAN is the state government’s intranet, but it is yet to be made widely available to all officers. The website, maintained by the department, was hacked 10 days after it was made mandatory for officers to enter data related to farmers online in real time.
‘Revolutionary initiative’
The website is a revolutionary initiative to bring in accountability and transparency, said V Srinivas, joint director of the department in Kasargod. “It took months of coaxing and motivating to make the officers adapt to the new website. The department had purchased Lenovo tablets for the animal inspectors. That was when the website was hacked by the pro-Pakistani group,” said Balachandran. The department had decided to register all livestock farmers in the state online. The website will have the farmers’ Aadhaar number, details of their landholdings and types of animals and poultry. There are slots for monitoring the vaccinations for foot and mouth disease and progress of artificial insemination. “Though initially designed for internal monitoring, plans were afoot to open the site for the farmers to inform them about the government schemes and keep a tab on their own livestock and farm,” he said. A field officer said the delay in restoring the site has led to a huge pile up.