The issue emerged after the results of various examinations were declared in the last few months. When results of the Higher Secondary examination were declared, the websites remained clogged for hours and with the Madhyamik examination the websites had posted the results a few hours earlier. And last week, the Joint Entrance Examination results could be accessed online only three hours after the scheduled time.
The government websites operate on a bandwith of 256 kbps. When results of an examination are uploaded on a website with information of lakhs of students, the sites require a larger bandwidth for smooth running of the sites. The website operators have to approach the service providers to meet this requirement.
If a board, however, comes up with the results at a short notice, the website operators cannot offer larger bandwidth. Resultantly the website, which is carrying the result, fail to respond to simultaneous hits by lakhs of students.
Anindo Ganguly, an officer at Information and Cultural department of the state government, explained the recent JEE result fiasco. “Only a day before the scheduled date, the Joint Entrance Examination board informed that they will publish the results on June 12. The website is operating at a bandwidth of 256 kbps whereas it should have a bandwidth of 2 mbps,” said Ganguly, whose department runs a few government websites.
Sources said that the CDs containing the JEE results were handed to the website operators at 11.15 am but the results could not be loaded till 1 pm. According to the sources, the private agency, which compiled the database of the results had prepared it in PDF format whereas the websites required the data in ASCI format.
“When the results were uploaded on our website, we called engineers and got it fixed,” said Siddharth Dutta, JEE chairman.