Union government, Election Commission’s RTI portals face ’emergency maintenance’, data leaks

For much of this week, the Union government’s RTI Online portal, for filing Right to Information applications to central government bodies, has been undergoing ’emergency maintenance,’ preventing applicants from retrieving their filed applications conveniently. Meanwhile, it emerged that the Election Commission of India (ECI), which maintains its own RTI portal, patched its systems to fix an issue exposing RTI applicants’ personal data, a security vulnerability that was disclosed by security researcher Karan Saini to the news portal TechCrunch.

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-in) coordinated with the ECI to resolve the vulnerability, it told TechCrunch in a statement, adding that it had fixed the issue since.

This was not the only issue on the Election Commission’s RTI portal, which had been facing issues accepting payments through its payment gateway. While the payment gateway is now working and applications are going through, the accepted methods have been limited to net banking and credit/debit cards, even though Razorpay typically offers most digital payment methods on other sites it serves; at least one major bank, the State Bank of India, is not a listed option for Net Banking. The Hindu has reached out to the ECI and Razorpay for comment.