Glitches remain, 1 lakh register on Day 2

BENGALURU: After the dismal start to registration for Gruha Jyothi, technical glitches continued to affect the process on Day 2, Monday. Hoping to register for the free power scheme, many citizens stood in long queues for hours at BangaloreOne and KarnatakaOne centres and subdivision offices of Bescom, only to return disappointed as the servers crashed throwing up error messages. However, the energy department which registered about 55,000 households on Sunday, managed to double its tally on the second day with over one lakh aspiring beneficiaries enrolling. Unable to register on mobile and website on Sunday, several consumers flocked to facilitation centres, resulting in long queues. But the repeated error messages and programming failure forced many to return empty-handed. Waiting at the Bescom facilitation centre on MG Road, Kamalavalli, a citizen from Shantinagar said, “I have been standing here for over an hour. But officials are unable to process the registration. The first two attempts showed error messages and they asked me to come an hour later. When I went again, they told me the servers had crashed. I had availed a day’s leave but nothing could be achieved.” Thousands of citizens across Karnataka are said to have reported the same problem. Kumuda Veeresh, a techie from JP Nagar, tried registering on mobile and laptop for two consecutive days, but in vain. “Despite logging in multiple times, all I could do was choose the language and Escom name. By the time I entered my customer ID, the website crashed. The government should not have advertised about registration without proper backup,” she rued. TOI tried to reach e-governance officials who are handling the Seva Sindhu registration portal, but principal secretary V Ponnuraj IAS and director Dileesh Sasi IAS did not respond to messages and calls. A senior official from the energy department acknowledged that servers crashed following heavy rush. “A citizen has to key in only three details — account ID, Aadhaar number and select type of occupancy. The other details such as the account holder’s name and address would be auto-filled based on the account ID as Escoms have shared their customer database. But in most cases, the details are not auto-filling due to server crash,” an engineer with the department revealed. From servers to cloud platformAnticipating the possible rush for registration, the energy department, in consultation with the e-governance department, had deferred the registration process by three days. “The initial capacity of the servers was to handle 5 lakh visitors/day. However, by postponing the process, we augmented the capacity to process at least 10 lakh visitors per day. But the average traffic is more than 10 lakh, resulting in crashes. Over 2.1 crore households are eligible and all have rushed at the same time. We are now switching to cloud platform to cater to the greater rush,” said another department official.