Common electors of Bengal had faced a tough time to search the 2002 post-SIR electoral rolls for hours on Thursday as the website of Bengal chief electoral officer crashed due to heavy traffic.
The Election Commission of India acted promptly and resolved the issue temporarily, giving a sigh of relief to those who wanted to check whether their names figured in the 2002 electoral rolls.
“There was a glitch in the website as the server that the website is linked to has limited space. It was fixed by the NIC (National Informatics Centre) by afternoon on Thursday. The fix is temporary and the problem will be resolved by the CEO’s office shortly,” said a poll panel source in Delhi. “The outage was not caused by hacking.”
Sources in the Bengal CEO’s office said that the website was maintained by the NIC and there was a policy decision that the agency would not upgrade its server and that website would be managed by the state data centre under the Bengal government’s IT department henceforth.
“The shifting process is on and it would take another two-three days to shift the entire data to the server of the state data centre,” said a source in the CEO’s office.
But several people said that at a time of confusion over the SIR, the glitch only aggravated the tension of those seeking access the 2002 rolls.
“Everybody is anxious to find out their own or their parents’ names in the 2002 SIR rolls. As the website of the CEO is the only source to check the list, I was trying to find our names from morning, but could not as the website had crashed,” said Sibaprashad Roy of Bolpur.
Some said the EC should have taken steps to ensure that there was no such glitch after rolling out of the SIR.
“If it was known that the NIC server had limited space, why was data shifting to the state data centre not done earlier? The EC must have been aware that anxious people would search for their names right after the SIR dates were announced,” said Juthika Dutta of Rishra, Hooghly.
Some officials said the EC should have pushed the state data centre to finish the process much before rolling out the SIR as heavy traffic on the Bengal CEO website was a foregone conclusion.