BANGALORE: Kannada lovers who have been following the state government’s efforts to re-vitalise Kannada, would be familiar with the name www.dasasahitya.org. Launched five years ago by the then CM, the site which hosted the 35 volumes of Kannada Dasa Sahitya now hosts links to porn marketing websites.
The new website, hosted on a government server, www.dasasahitya.
gov.in, is a crippled version whose links and buttons often do not work. Users who have been searching for the website most often do not come across it and even if they do, using it turns out to be another challenge.
In 2004, with the aim of preserving this important section of Kannada literature, the government released 35 volumes of Dasa Sahitya and the then Chief Minister launched the website — all at a cost of over Rs 1.5 crore. Two years back when the website was shifted to a government server, the designated address changed to www.
dasasahitya.gov.in. Not only was the larger public not informed about the change, the new website soon crashed as well.
No one knew where the website disappeared to, until Express contacted the Department of Kannada and Culture. A day after Express spoke with officials at the department, a skeleton website suddenly made an appearance. Most of the buttons, links and pages still do not work properly.
Try googling the site and you would not get anything. The same goes for other popular search engines like yahoo or bing. The earlier domain name www.dasasahitya.
org now hosts links to porn marketing websites.
The Director of the Department of Kannada and Culture, M P Baligar, claims that the website is being “re-audited.” Another project which was announced at the same time is not faring much better either.
Almost three years after being commissioned, www.vachanasahitya.
gov, supposed to host 1,000 verses from the Vachana Sahitya, is not complete. Officials claim that the digitized copy is still in its “finishing stages.” The vachana sahitya website is also shoddily maintained. It is practically unreadable in browsers other than Internet Explorer or Netscape. Netscape is now obsolete.
If one uses browsers like Firefox, used by a large chunk of internet users, all that is visible is a lot of question marks and some gibberish.
When contacted, M P Baligar said that the issue has not been brought to the department’s notice and that he has now taken it up with the concerned authority.
jayadevan@expressbuzz.com