KOCHI: Over the past few days, the Kochi corporation website has been unavailable. Interestingly, the website —which used to issue birth, death, and marriage certificates — had crashed after the audit report for the financial year (FY) 2019-20 was released.
The first corporation in Kerala to have offered basic online registration, Kochi is now way behind in the digital race, with other municipalities in the district implementing the digital platform successfully.
Mayor M Anilkumar, however, was clueless about the server being down. “Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) was the agency contracted to implement the e-governance system, but the corporation parted ways with it last year. We have approached the Information Kerala Mission (IKM) to begin work on the website from scratch. I am unaware of the problem with the server. I will check with the technical team and get it resolved,” he said.
The Mayor said, till a couple of weeks ago, options to avail birth, death, and marriage certificates online were available. “It is a shame for the Kochi corporation authorities to waste crores to build a website, and still be unable to maintain it, especially when other civic bodies have them running,” said a retired Air Force officer residing in Kochi.
The recently published audit report stated that 5.5 crores was spent by the corporation to build its website. The e-governance project had turned out to be a complete failure, the report said.