HYDERABAD: For the fifth time in the last six months, the HMDA website has become dysfunctional for the last three days, causing severe inconvenience to users. Besides, HMDA officials have not been providing information to the public in a jurisdiction that is spread over seven districts.
Sources said that the appointment of a fire services officer as the chief information officer (CIO) was the reason for mismanagement of the official website.
According to highly placed sources, HMDA's decision to integrate its data with the State Data Centre (SDC) servers, ostensibly to protect it from hackers, had landed it in deep trouble. Authority officials are unable to open key files and the data is no longer compatible with the development permission management system (DPMS), which is the sole mechanism used by HMDA to accord permissions online.
Because of the glitch, hundreds of users have been thronging HMDA headquarters in Ameerpet. The HMDA has neither notified nor given any clarification to those who had applied for building and layout permissions and for making LRS payments. In fact, people were deprived of clay idols and plants at nurseries in these three days.
Sources said that the mismanagement of the website was purely because a less qualified official has taken over as the CIO, and one who has minimal knowledge about information technology.
However, authorities stated that the website was down due to maintenance issues. They said that the SDC had been toiling to get the website fixed.
"Even though SDC provided a temporary fix that worked on Thursday, the technical snag resurfaced. The migration of the database has been troublesome," a senior HMDA official, adding that the SDC has promised to come up with a permanent solution within the next two days. The state IT department has been notified, he said.
On the fifth snag in six months, and appointing a fireman as CIO, officials avoided giving a reply and merely said they were not supposed to interact with the media.
The HMDA was earlier overly concerned about hacking after receiving numerous complaints from individuals who had applied for building and layout permissions and regularisation of their land holdings under the LRS. When over 10,000 applications were rejected, the applicants informed the authorities that they were being denied access to certain features in the official portal.
When officials looked into the complaints, they found that their site had been hacked. A malware used by hackers crashed DPMS as well as the operating systems of all computers used in HMDA office. Even though the bugs were fixed, the authorities felt that it would be unsafe to maintain data on their servers.
