A widespread disruption of West Bengal government websites since Monday has affected several essential citizen services, including the issuance and downloading of birth and death certificates, online tax payments and services offered by the labour department.
The disruption has also affected the websites of Kolkata Police, Bidhannagar City Police, the state Personnel and Administrative Reforms Department and West Bengal Electronics Industry Development Corporation Ltd (Webel), with several portals reportedly slowing down or malfunctioning.
The Janma Mrityu Tathya portal, used for birth and death registration and certificates, has been among the key services affected. A Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) official said the civic body had been unable to access the portal since Monday, preventing the issuance and uploading of digital birth and death certificates. While some users reportedly managed to download certificates, most were unable to access the service.
Online payment of property tax through the KMC website has also been disrupted.
The outage has triggered concerns over the possible cause of the disruption. Independent IT experts associated with the state government have raised the possibility of a malware or ransomware-related issue. However, state officials have attributed the disruption to scheduled maintenance and an audit of the state’s e-governance infrastructure.
The affected services are hosted at the West Bengal State Data Centre in Salt Lake’s Moni Bhandar, which serves as a central infrastructure hub for government portals and e-governance applications. The state data centre describes itself as a shared infrastructure facility for hosting and managing e-governance applications, with central data storage and online delivery of citizen services.
Officials said the disruption was not limited to Kolkata and had affected several services across the state. A district magistrate said websites hosted on the State Data Centre were facing problems, while portals hosted on the central government’s National Informatics Centre were functioning normally.
Some IT department officials, speaking anonymously, said the shutdown was part of a scheduled maintenance and security audit. A state official ruled out a cyberattack and said such audits were carried out based on inputs from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), the national agency responsible for coordinating responses to cybersecurity incidents.
The official said such audits were likely to be conducted more frequently in view of the growing risks to digital infrastructure, including threats involving artificial intelligence.
No senior state government official has publicly confirmed that the disruption was caused by a cyberattack. IT Minister Kalyan Chakraborti could not be reached for comment, while calls to IT department secretary Shubhanjan Das went unanswered. Nitu Shukla, special secretary in the IT department and a senior Webel official, said she was not authorised to comment. Ashok Prasad, additional director general of police in charge of the cyber cell, said he was unaware of the issue and declined to comment.
The disruption has raised concerns because the State Data Centre hosts a wide range of government applications and critical data. The centre’s official website says it provides secure data storage, online delivery of services, application and database monitoring, backup facilities and security infrastructure for hosted applications.
The outage comes as several West Bengal government services increasingly depend on online platforms for routine public transactions. The Janma Mrityu Tathya portal, for instance, provides services ranging from new birth and death registrations to certificate downloads, corrections and digitisation.
For citizens awaiting certificates, making tax payments or accessing other government services, the disruption has resulted in delays, while authorities work to restore normal operations.
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