Does the Government understand cyber space?

While the Goverment departments are making some progress on the internet (publishing content, forms, e-filing of taxes) etc they still have a long way to go.

Bangalore has been known as the IT capital of India for a long time. Successive governments have shown their dis-interest in the internet very consistently.

BangaloreIT.com was the brain child of the late IAS officer Sanjoy Das Gupta. I believe the first edition of this was held in 1998. It was a huge success. In 2005, to display the patriotism the name was changed to BangaloreIT.in. And to demonstrate whatever, the name has been changed to BangaloreIT.biz for the Nov 2008 show. The sad part is that the government has lost the domains BangaloreIT.com and BangaloreIT.in to cyber squatters 🙁 This is unpardonable.

On Wikia.com if you search for Karnataka you may see a bizarre result. I have the snap shot of the result here for you,

The official website of Karnataka govt is supposed to be Karnataka.gov.in. Now we have two official websites. If both of these domains were pointing to the same website it was one thing but each URL shows a different site.

I was aware of the names of many cities being changed in Karnataka but wasn’t aware Karnataka was now known as Karunadu. And how on earth did the government of India agree to create the domain karunadu.gov.in for the Karnataka state government?

Update: In May 2014 I observed this domain karundu.gov.in was no longer active. Not sure if this happened because of the new government (Narendra Modi)