Kolkata: A range of govt services on several state portals has been unavailable since at least Monday, triggering speculation about the cause.Among the services hit were downloading of birth and death certificates from the Janma Mrityu Tathya portal, payment of online tax through Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s website and key services on the labour department’s website, officials said. A large volume of the state finance department’s data has gone missing, the officials said.The websites of Kolkata Police, Bidhannagar City Police, state personnel and administrative reforms department and West Bengal Electronics Industry Development Corporation Ltd (Webel) have either slowed down or been malfunctioning.Independent IT experts who work closely with the state govt have flagged concerns over a possible “malware or ransomware problem”.No state govt official spoke on record. Some IT department officials said on condition of anonymity that the services have been unavailable because of “scheduled maintenance and audit of e-governance infrastructure” at West Bengal State Data Centre housed in Moni Bhandar in Salt Lake. The data centre hosts Bengal govt portals, consolidates e-governance applications and also serves as a repository of critical govt data.IT minister Kalyan Chakraborti could not be reached for comment. Calls to Shubhanjan Das, IT department secretary, went unanswered.Nitu Shukla, special secretary in the IT department and senior Webel official, said she was “not authorised to speak”. Ashok Prasad, additional director general of police (cyber cell), said: “I am not aware (of the problem) and will not speak on the issue.”Several officials narrated the problems they have been facing. “We have not been able to work on the Janmya Mrityu Tathya portal since Monday. As a result, birth and death certificates cannot be issued,” a KMC official said. The portal allows citizens to download the certificates. Sources said that while a few people succeeded in downloading the certificates, most could not.KMC officials said the glitch is preventing the uploading of digital birth and death certificates. An official of the civic body said online payment of property tax has been hit, too.A district magistrate said the disruption is not restricted to Kolkata but has affected a host of services across the state.“The affected websites are all hosted on State Data Centre. The ones hosted on the central govt’s National Informatics Centre are working well,” said a source.A state official ruled out a cyberattack, attributing the disruption in service to a routine infrastructure audit. “Such exercises are based on inputs from Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-in), a national body. The audit will be undertaken more frequently to neutralise the growing risk of digital infrastructure breach by AI tools,” the official said.
