Flunked-out ex-RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, sitting in the US, suddenly gained expertise in COVID Pandemic Management. (Put another way, they wondered what I wondered: “Can adults really be this incompetent?”) The Indian Express attacked PanchaJanya’s article without doing an independent assessment of the quality of the portal, as usual for the Indian English language “mainstream media”. They also wondered whether the long track record of InfoSys in making a total mess of large and critical government initiatives, was due to some foreign or other anti-national motive.

The Hindi magazine PanchaJanya published an article which cited the poor quality of the software, and wondered whether Infosys would supply such a product in such a state to any of its foreign customers, and expect to survive. This year the “new” InfoSys-developed Income Tax Portal has been in the news, though the news interest appears to have been squelched. And that I have to keep at it until it comes up right, not throw it over the wall as “working software”.

I do know how to do some computer software programming, enough to know that “Hello World” takes me about 5 tries to get working.

So my experience, though anecdotal, is based on decades of experience for depth of comparison. I have been filing Indian income tax returns since the days when it was done all on paper.

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