Kolkata: Waiting to pay property tax? Is it taking inordinately long to get a slot for birth/death registration? Functioning of several KMC key departments has been crippled due to recent cyber-attacks.All functions of KMC assessment department that include tax receipt and mutation of properties are on hold. Similarly, KMC health department officials are struggling to keep the birth/death registration system functional. A section of KMC finance department officials fear disbursement of salary may become a challenge if normalcy is not restored in a couple of days.A range of govt services on several state portals have been unavailable since Sept 16, triggering speculation about the cause.Among the services hit were downloading of birth and death certificates from Janma Mrityu Tathya portal, payment of online tax through Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s website and key services on the labour department’s website, officials said. A large volume of the state finance department’s data has gone missing, the officials said.Several state govt websites, including Kolkata Police, Bidhannagar City Police, state personnel and administrative reforms department and West Bengal Electronics Industry Development Corporation Ltd (Webel) have either slowed down or are malfunctioning.Independent IT experts who work closely with state govt have flagged concerns over a possible “malware or ransomware problem”.No state govt official was willing to speak on record. Some IT department officials said on condition of anonymity that the services have been unavailable because of “scheduled maintenance and audit of e-governance infrastructure” at West Bengal State Data Centre housed in Moni Bhandar in Salt Lake. The data centre hosts Bengal govt portals, consolidates e-governance applications and also serves as a repository of critical govt data.Several officials narrated the problems they have been facing. “We have not been able to work on the Janma Mrityu Tathya portal for more than 10 days. As a result, issuance of birth and death certificates has landed in trouble,” a KMC official said. The portal allows citizens to download the certificates. Sources said that while a few people succeeded in downloading the certificates, most could not in the past couple of weeks.KMC officials said the glitch is preventing the uploading of digital birth and death certificates.According to a KMC assessment department official, the revenue from the property tax collection has hit an all-time low due to non-functioning of the online payment system. “We have been receiving scores of complaints from property taxpayers across the city who have been denied an online payment opportunity,” said the civic official. Non-functioning of the online system has led to stalling of mutation clearance of newly purchased flats and other properties, the official added. KMC finance department has also been worst hit. “We are apprehensive about disbursement of salary to the civic employees this month-end if the system is not restored,” said a KMC finance department official.A district magistrate said the disruption is not restricted to Kolkata but has affected a host of services across the state.“The affected websites are all hosted on State Data Centre. The ones hosted on the Central govt’s National Informatics Centre are working well,” said a source.According to officials, the disruption followed a technical glitch at State Data Centre. However, several IT experts who work closely with the state govt have raised concerns that the disruption could be linked to a possible “malware or ransomware” attack.The experts have been working round the clock to restore the affected services, officials said. According to several IT experts who work closely with state govt, the data recovery centres have also “failed to retrieve a significant portion of the lost data”. They also raised questions about the efficacy of the Security Operation Centre under West Bengal Cyber Security Centre of Excellence (WB-CSCoE), which has been set up for monitoring, analysing and defending critical IT infrastructure against cyber threats.
