India’s huge population, particularly the young Indians, is ready to put India at the driving seat of the Internet revolution in coming days. At the same time, the old-fashioned and non-technical Indian bureaucracy is pulling the country back with its slow process of adjustment with fast moving world of Internet in the country.

The hacked e-mail addresses of NDA, DRDO officials have already revealed the inefficiency of India’s cyber security. Now, here is another example of sluggishness of Indian bureaucracy. The old website address of the Central Inland Waterways Transport Corporation Ltd (CIWTC) has been taken by a Russian site for using pornographic links.

CIWTC is Public Sector Unit (PSU) based in Kolkata under the Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport & Highways. The Russian host has been using the site address for elaborating pornographic links since last month.

According to IE reports, the domain name of the PSU (www.ciwtc.com) had been expired in June 2006. The CIWTC officials found after months of expiring the domain name that this was being used by some pornographic site host. Then only, the PSU launched its new website as www.ciwtcltd.com. It has also filed complaints with the police and informed National Informatics Centre (NIC) about this development.

Praful Tayal, CMD of CIWTC said:

The website (www.ciwtc.com) was not really hacked. It has been taken over by a Russian company because our domain name had expired. We received information about some pornographic links displayed on the website.

We informed National Informatics Centre that has blocked the links. So no damage has been done. We lodged a police complaint a week back and informed the cyber crime cell. We also recently put out advertisements, informing the public of the change in our web address.

Tayal said later that the CIWTC has also informed the international Internet protocol body, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) about this matter. ICANN is the agency that is responsible for the global coordination of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers.

But, the major question is that why the CIWTC reacted so late when its domain name had been expired in June last year? This is being said that the PSU had single IT personnel who took voluntary retirement in 2006. When he left the PSU, no one was there to take care of the domain name’s expiry date. No one bothered to check when and how the Russian dating site took over the PSU’s domain name.

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