Should someone ask you to use an Indian government portal or service, your instinctive reaction would most certainly not be delight. You don’t imagine a clean, seamless interaction. You imagine ‘work.’ A mental sigh before the mouse click.

Let’s talk about the digital products / services first.

Surprisingly, some of these rival, and sometimes perhaps, surpass private sector offerings in reliability and efficiency. A few have evolved to be unmatched globally:

• IRCTC went from being perhaps the most stressful site in India to handling millions of railway bookings daily, integrating with private apps, and offering smooth payment flows.

• Income Tax e-filing evolved from clunky, Java forms to a mobile-friendly, pre-filled return system.

• Passport Seva shifted most processes online, reducing queues (and uncertainty) at passport offices.

• CoWIN managed real-time vaccine booking and certificates for over a billion people, integrating with WhatsApp and Aarogya Setu.

• UPI turned instant, free, interbank transfers into an everyday reality for everyone, from street vendors to large retailers. Handles 18+ billion transactions monthly.

• FASTag – One-tag toll payment nationwide.

• Aadhaar + India Stack – Arguably the world’s largest biometric ID system with integrated eKYC, eSign, and DigiLocker, and enabling paperless governance.

So why, then, do these successes not erase the dread?

Well, reliability ≠ usability.

Visually, these portals are a kaleidoscope of design philosophies: wildly different visual layouts, navigation patterns and terminology across not only products (open the Aadhar, IRCTC, and Parivahan sites and you’ll know). Portals assume prior knowledge of jargon (e.g., “EPFO UAN activation” or state revenue department terms like Khasra, Khatauni, Mutation). Filling forms would give you obscure, irrelevant, or inaccurate errors, or ask for inputs in a nonconforming pattern. When it comes to information architecture, they manage to keep the eyes and mind in full vigilance.

The work mostly gets done, but not without taking an emotional and/or mental toll. It’s like those healthy foods that benefit you, but also leave a terrible aftertaste. Or like braving a Black Friday sale, scoring a pair of jeans, but losing your will to live in the process. Functional success (as tech marvels), emotional failure (as public service).

While India’s digital services often struggle with aesthetic elegance or intuitive flow, it’s important to place their achievements in global context. Take Estonia, for instance — the poster child for e-governance. Almost all state services there, from voting to medical prescriptions, are digitised end-to-end. The interfaces are clean, fast, and thoughtfully designed. But Estonia serves a population of just 1.3 million — barely the size of a mid-tier Indian city like Agra. Scaling that same “feel-good” experience to India’s 1.4 billion people, across close to two dozen official languages and extreme diversity in devices, literacy, and connectivity, is a fundamentally different challenge. Similarly, South Korea boasts some of the world’s most advanced citizen service portals, often praised for their user-centric design. Yet the country’s population is 51 million, with near-universal broadband and high digital literacy. In India, by contrast, any government platform must perform for a spectrum that ranges from a farmer in rural Bihar using a feature phone to a banker in Mumbai on fibre internet — all in the same system.

However, there’s a flaw in that argument. A large portion of India’s population is still not a user of any of these products. IRCTC—the most-used Indian government website by Indian users—gets a traffic of ~100M. That’s less than 2% of what Google gets, 20% of what Instagram gets, and slightly lower than what India’s Flipkart/Meesho gets. More people can stream cricket seamlessly and simultaneously than can book tickets.