West Bengal state portals have faced widespread outages, disrupting birth and death certificates, online property-tax payments and other government services, while officials cited maintenance and an audit of the state’s data-centre infrastructure amid concerns over digital security.
The disruption has affected the Janma Mrityu Tathya portal, which is used to issue and download birth and death certificates, as well as the Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s online tax-payment service and key services on the labour department’s website. The websites of Kolkata Police, Bidhannagar City Police, the state personnel and administrative reforms department and West Bengal Electronics Industry Development Corporation Ltd have also reportedly slowed down or malfunctioned.
A KMC official said the civic body had been unable to work on the Janma Mrityu Tathya portal since Monday, preventing the issuance of birth and death certificates. While some users were reportedly able to download certificates, most could not. KMC officials also said the disruption had prevented the uploading of digital birth and death certificates and affected online property-tax payments.
The outage is not limited to Kolkata, according to a district magistrate cited in the report. A source said several affected websites were hosted at the West Bengal State Data Centre in Moni Bhandar, Salt Lake. The facility hosts state government portals, consolidates e-governance applications and stores critical government data.
Some officials cited “scheduled maintenance and audit of e-governance infrastructure” as the reason for the service interruption. A state official ruled out a cyberattack and said the exercise was linked to inputs from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT-In. The official said such audits would be conducted more frequently to address the growing risk of breaches of digital infrastructure involving artificial intelligence tools.
However, independent information-technology experts who work closely with the state government raised concerns about a possible malware or ransomware problem. The report also said officials had stated that a large volume of data belonging to the state finance department had gone missing. That claim was not independently confirmed in the supplied report.
No state government official spoke on record to confirm the full cause or scope of the disruption. Information Technology 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 speak. Ashok Prasad, additional director general of police in charge of the cyber cell, said he was not aware of the issue and would not comment.
The disruption has also highlighted the operational dependence of citizen-facing services on a common state data-centre infrastructure. Services hosted on the central government’s National Informatics Centre were reported to be functioning normally. The state’s next steps will depend on the completion of the infrastructure audit and the restoration of affected portals, including the systems used for civic certificates and online tax payments.
