Hundreds of pensioners who queued up in front of Akshaya centres in Kottayam for online mustering had to endure half a day’s wait on Thursday, thanks to a sluggish server.
Long queues of people, mostly aged above 60 years who receive pension from the State government, could be seen in front of these centres right from the morning. As hours passed by, people continued to pour in huge numbers and they were made to wait outside in the heat.
With the proceedings experiencing an inordinate delay, they were given tokens and asked to wait for their turns. At the same time, several people who had come from faraway locations returned disappointed.
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When contacted, officials with the Akshya project office attributed the serpentine queues to a server slowdown.
“The problem may have occurred due to the sheer number of people who logged from different locations at the same point of time. Completing the process has become troublesome as the average waiting time per head has increased from just five minutes to about 45 minutes. The situation, however, has improved a lot when compared to the previous occasions when the server experienced a complete breakdown,” said an official.
According to the official, the server speed was varying across the 190 Akshaya centres throughout the day. “While some centres completed the mustering of as many as 80-90 persons, the centres at some other locations were even unable to login to the website,” the official added.
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Though the window for online mustering of pensioners had opened four days ago, the process was suspended immediately with the server developing several glitches.
Following this, the website underwent a capacity-enhancement work by the National Informatics Centre even as the schedule for mustering was divided into two clusters – each comprising seven districts.
Meanwhile, the window of completing the registration process too was extended to December 15 from November 30.
The online mustering for pensioners under the various welfare schemes of the State government aims at linking their Aadhaar cards with the respective life certificates so as to weed out ineligible beneficiaries.