In response to Moneylife’s queries on issues faced by users while uploading submissions to MCA21 portal, Infosys’s director V Balakrishnan has offered a detailed technical response. He also asserted that Infosys has inherited technical problems from TCS, which was running the MCA21 portal in the past

Infosys, taking a note of issues raised by Moneylife, has accepted that there were some problems with MCA21, the e-filing portal of Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) due to updation of its intrusion prevention system (IPS) signatures.

In an email response to our queries, V Balakrishnan, member of the Board at Infosys, said, "...of late the users have faced failures in uploading submissions and making subsequent payment of the fees. The root cause of the error was traced to our intrusion prevention system (IPS) whose signatures were updated recently. The signatures were updated after an advisory on cyber security attacks. One of the signatures was causing the system to interpret legitimate e-Form uploads as intrusion and resetting the client connection. The same IPS was also blocking redirection to the payment gateway. The issue was resolved after the specific signature was modified on 16 September 2013."

"MCA-21 is a very important project for us and we will take every effort to make this work to the satisfaction of all the stakeholders. We had met with various professional bodies recently to address all their issues.” Infosys is meeting more users at its campus to apprise them all the initiatives taken and also to address his specific issues, Mr Balakrishnan added.

As reported earlier, a group of Chartered Accountants (CAs), Company Secretaries (CS), CWAs, lawyers, companies and consultants have started an open petition on Change.org  to highlight the issues they are facing everyday due to malfunction of MCA21 portal. Binoy Chacko of BG & Associates had said, “The difficulties created by MCA21 are resulting in huge penalty, duplicate fee payments, and waste of professional man-hours across country, delay of application or approval process at Registrar of Companies-ROC and MCA offices."  

As Moneylife has reported several times in the last eight months, MCA21, the showpiece of e-Governance and corporate filing portal, which, for the first time has made all corporate filings available online, has been sputtering. This is especially after Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) handed over the portal to Infosys. Since then, people accessing MCA21 for paid information or mandatory filing have been facing a nightmare.

This was supposed to be simple handover involving two of India's best and most reputed software companies. On 16th January, Tanmoy Chakrabarty, the head of Government Industry Solutions at TCS told Moneylife, “There was a round of bidding after the first seven-year contract was ending. We lost to Infosys on the price front in the MCA 21-II and we have gone through the full transition. In fact, at the end of business day today we have handed over all systems to the ministry of corporate affairs (MCA) and Infosys Technologies”.

At that time, the ministry had said the portal (MCA21) was undergoing transition of its operations and services to a new service provider. But there were a full 120 days provided in the contract for training and transition before the handover was completed. And TCS claimed that this was fully done to the satisfaction of Infosys as well as the ministry.

According to Mr Balakrishnan of Infosys, the system had teething issues during the transition due to some problems and they have worked to fix all of those. "The fact is that we inherited a system from the earlier service provider with many components which were past its end life with lots of manual scripts at the back end. We had put in enormous amount of efforts in reconfiguring the system, automating the scripts, upgrading the technology while making the disaster recovery system more robust," he said.

He added, "At the outset let me reiterate on behalf of Infosys that we consider MCA21 to be a project of national importance and shall do whatever it takes to do a professional job to the satisfaction of all stakeholders. We assure you that you will see significant improvements in the system going forward." Here is an excerpt from a detailed technical note from Infosys to Moneylife.

1. Improvements in the system:  We have taken a number of measures for improving the stability of the system. We have invested significantly in providing:

1. Additional/Upgraded servers such as Back Office database server, Monitoring Report Server, LDAP server.
2. Replacement of Network elements such as Cisco Firewall, Core Switches, Routers, Riverbed WAN optimizer, Radware Load Balancer.
3. Migration of the database to newly installed servers for better performance and stability.
4. Implementation of Linux based new LDAP servers (more number of cores), thus eliminating the frequent crashes of old LDAP servers.
5. Upgrading Software components such as LDAP and DB2.
6. Upgraded Bandwidth and Client Infrastructure refresh for Field offices. 

2. Root cause Analysis of the issues:  One of the most common issues raised by the stakeholder was the failures in uploading submissions and making subsequent payment of the fees. The root cause of the error was traced to our Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) whose signatures were updated recently. The signatures were updated after an advisory on cyber security attacks.

One of the signatures was causing the system to interpret legitimate e-Form uploads as intrusion and resetting the client connection. The same IPS was also blocking redirection to the payment gateway. The issue was resolved after the specific signature was modified on 16 September 2013. 

3. Peak filing preparedness:

a. The improvements made in infrastructure as above have been supported by augmentations in manpower for providing Helpdesk support and for ticket resolutions to cater to higher traffic in the peak filing period.
 

b. We have upgraded / added new hardware.  These changes have already been deployed in production as of 9th September 2013. We are monitoring their performance and are making necessary changes as required to ensure that we have a stable environment with added capacity prior to peak filing season.  

4. Performance:
     
   1. We would like to point out that the number of filings done in MCA portal for the period 16^th August to 16^th Sep for 2013 shows an increase compared to 2012. 

2. The ticket pendency is down to 350 from the highs of > 6000 in May 2013 time frame.  Please note that the ticketing process has a facility by which the originator is informed of its closure and the originator can reopen if not satisfied.

5. Issues reported by stake holders:

a. We are actively pursuing the issues reported by stakeholders in the past few weeks and have significantly increased field contact with stakeholders. We have conducted interaction sessions with stake holders at Delhi and have planned for stake holder interactions at Kolkata on 18th Sep 2013 and Hyderabad on 23rd September.
 

b. Our teams have been meeting stakeholders in various cities, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, etc. to see their issues first-hand and offer resolutions to their issues. Till date we have met more than 50 professionals in all these cities and we will continue to do so in the coming weeks as well.
 

c. We are also taking measures to address the issues through stakeholder education, improvement in system messages content.  

6. Future plans:  The MCA system was built over a period of six years.  We have been running it and resolving the teething issues of upgrading a live system.

This is the second major issue related to an e-governance issue highlighted by Moneylife. Earlier, Moneylife raised the issues faced by passport applicants at the facilitation centres (Passport Seva Kendra) managed by TCS. The high-level meeting of Pune Passport Grievance Forum with senior-most officials of TCS organised by Moneylife Foundation at its Mumbai office raised some hopes for the generally harassed passport applicant. (TCS assures smooth passport delivery system)

A week after the meeting, TCS took several steps like appointing a seasoned Verification Officer (VO) before Counter ‘A’ where documents are blindly scanned; extending the online appointment date to a week instead of a day; putting up boards to warn against illegal passport agents and putting up prominent boards to list the documents required for various categories of passports.