I visited the visa webs tie the article complained about. It was not very beautifully designed, but not especially awful either. This feels like one of those periodic Economist articles where the author vents about some personal grievance to fill up column inches during a slow news week.

- because they outsource to tcs

- tcs is the most mediocre software development company there is

- if they instead gave contracts to startups in bangalore / mumbai etc, they would do a far far better job at ui / ux

I do think most government agencies are crap. The only one I have encountered good were UK ones and they have a pretty strong and interesting stack. They showed a talk at a MozFest where their compatibility went back to Next browser iirc. Due to the same reason though some of their relatively simple forms are multiple pages since from what I understand they don't allow "branching sections" in a single page

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik9IeChLqEk (think it was this one)

P.S. I think US is worse in every aspect. Try booking a US Visa appointment. Also as someone who has done both, Indian tax filing is significantly better as compared to the US where a government site doesn't exist. The worst offender in India was the driving license portal. (Older forms did use to be a weird excel UI and getting it to work on libre office was a nightmare I abandoned)

Is it only the Indian government? I don't think that's in any way unique to India, I've seen many poor government websites.

Seems like The Economist can´t either

The only places I recall seeing a marquee tag are Geocities, my 11th standard programming class in Chennai, and Indian government websites. I suspect the last two things are not unrelated.

Corruption is what this looks like. The contracts are probably going to friends of politicians. It’s not hard to build a good website these days.

Brain drain. Anyone in India who knew how to build a website was H1B'ed a long long time ago.