No Standardisation of Browsers under Digital India
Moneylife Digital Team 23 April 2018
Digital India is an ambitious programme of the government of India to “transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.” The key pillars of Digital India are e-governance initiatives in all citizen-centric services. One of the earliest such projects was filing tax returns online and filing and accessing corporate information online. However, it appears that Digital India, the renamed project of e-governance, has been shabbily implemented. 
 
Different websites are optimised for different browsers and that too for different versions of different browsers. Goods and Services Tax works in Chrome but not so well in Internet Explorer (IE); for corporate filing (on MCA21, the ministry of corporate affairs’ site), only IE is useful. Regular users of MCA21 tell us that if there is an issue with the site and users contact the helpdesk, they are told first, please use IE and only with so and so versions; the site will not work well with other browsers and even with other versions of IE. 
 
Maharashtra Value Added Tax portal works well only with Firefox. And we are not even discussing mobile browsers and their versions. One accounting and tax expert says that he does not upgrade his browsers to their newer version for fear that some site or the other will stop working. Testing is an essential part of deploying software. But this does not seem to be in place even though the government has enormously expanded the scope of e-governance.
 
In 2006, the government had launched National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) with 31 Mission Mode projects covering various domains. After the Modi government came to power, the thrust was expanded from e-governance to inclusive growth that covers electronic services, products, devices and job opportunities. The initiative was given a new name—Digital India. Unfortunately, the people, organisations and systems have remained the same. 
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