HYDERABAD: The official portal of the Government of Andhra Pradesh is freezing in the wastes of Cyberia.
For all practical purposes, it virtually doesn’t exist in the virtual domain and it might be just as well if it is renamed www.apoffline.gov.in The visitor to the site is invited to ‘Connect to your government through APOnline’ and is left scratching his head as to how to do that.
Try getting in touch with the ministers through email and you are bound to fail — most of the time.
And mails sent to the chief minister’s account, as also to those of various ministers bounce back. This has been the experience of Express. Of the 39 mails sent to the ministers, 30 bounced back. And as regards those that went through, God alone knows when a reply will be forthcoming.
Among the dysfunctional email accounts are those of key persons like Minister for Information and Public Relations & Tourism Anam Ramnarayana Reddy, IT and Communications Minister Ramreddy Damodar Reddy and Home Minister Jana Reddy. However, the case of Small-scale Industries Minister Gollapalli Surya Rao is uncomplicated. He does not have an email account.
‘‘The portal does not even have fax numbers of the ministers’ offices. Apart from meeting them in person, there is no way of getting in touch with them,’’ a concerned citizen told Express. One can imagine what this entails for, say, a Telugu from Silicon Valley or an executive from a multinational company trying to make contact.
When contacted, IT Adviser to the Government CS Rao admitted that he had been receiving complaints about the portal and expressed confidence that problems would be sorted out soon. Incidentally, the officer, who looks after the official portal, was unavailable.
He is said to be in ‘‘a training camp in Ahmedabad’’.
Sources in the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the official service provider to the portal, say the glitches could be due to a server problem and maintain that so far they have not received any complaint over bouncing mails.
A ‘‘knowledge manager’’ at the Centre for Good Governance, where ministers and senior officials are given orientation on computer operations through seminars and workshops, observed ruefully that the training sessions are of no use as most of the participants are not interested in picking up new skills.