• Citizens who turn to the State online often cannot find it, read it, or trust it. A roadmap, an official inbox, and open data would show them the way in

A farmer in rural Sri Lanka can borrow money on their phone in minutes. The app is simple, the cash arrives at a tap, and the reminders follow them everywhere. What it hides are the fees, the interest, and the harassment that begin when they fall behind. 

According to the World Bank, six in 10 of the country’s 1.65 million smallholder farmers already depend on informal lenders, largely because formal credit is so hard to reach. Online gambling works the same way: polished, persuasive, and one tap away. By October, the Central Bank’s list of prohibited financial schemes, many of them apps, had reached 27.

Now consider the same farmer’s encounter with the Government. The app that lends to them at interest that can top 500% a year needs only their phone. A State service needs their day, or more: a bus ride to a divisional office, a queue, a missing form, and often a second trip. Where the median monthly wage in agriculture is under Rs. 25,000, every lost day is income they cannot spare. 

Online, they may not be able to tell which Government website is real – it is probably not in their language – and the email address may be a free account anyone could have opened. The lender has studied the user; the State has barely noticed them. Sri Lanka has promised a digital state for two decades and now has a Ministry of Digital Economy to deliver it. Yet in the contest for the citizen’s screen, the swindlers are winning.

A modest test, poorly passed

Volunteers at the Lanka Data Foundation recently checked 577 Government websites, from ministries to hospitals and missions abroad, against a deliberately modest test: does the site open, is it secure, is it in all three languages, and does it use an official address and email? Nine in 10 sites were online and nearly 95% had a valid security certificate. Beyond those easy wins, the picture falls apart.

Only 65.4% listed an email address on their own official domain; the rest pointed citizens to personal or free accounts and 5.9% gave none at all. An official email address is the State’s signature. A department that asks the public to write to a free account teaches citizens to trust addresses anyone can create in a minute, which is all a fraudster needs.

Cabinet reshuffles make it worse. Each renaming or merger brings new websites and email addresses, while the old ones linger online, unattended. Some ministries run two or three sites; even the National Audit Office appears twice. A citizen cannot tell which address is real. Neither, it seems, can the State.

Built for the launch, not for use

Digital transformation in Sri Lanka has been measured in ceremonial launches, rarely by whether citizens can use what was built. 

Most Government websites break the State’s own rules: just 36.7% offered their content fully in Sinhala, Tamil, and English, as the Information Communication Technology Agency’s (ICTA) 2022 guidelines require, while 57.6% were mostly in English. Even where translations existed, many could not be reached because the language button was missing or broken. One in seven multilingual sites relied on machine translation, tolerable for opening hours but not for a circular that decides someone’s pension.

The weakest scores belong to the offices citizens use most. Three in four ministry websites earned an A, but only 37.7% of department sites did; a third of hospital sites scored an F, and 85.7% of overseas missions, often a migrant worker’s only link to the State, a D. Yet this is where clinic bookings, forms, and passport renewals could move online, and cheaply. 

The cost of inertia is real: the Deputy Minister of Digital Economy has said that cash transactions cost about 1.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) a year and ICTA estimates going digital could save up to 0.6%, roughly Rs. 180 billion. Only about 4% of Sri Lankans complete a Government transaction online. Meanwhile, the audit found compromised Government sites redirecting visitors to foreign gambling pages.

A perfect score, a failing service

The scorecard measures only the floor and clearing it does not guarantee a usable service. The Inland Revenue Department’s website scored a full 100, yet some of the 1.2 million taxpayers who must now file online say they have waited hours for it to load, and a repeat PIN request is refused for seven working days.

The Bribery Commission is in the news almost every day, yet its own website is barely there. Asset declarations can now be filed only through its online portal. When the portal buckled before the 30 June deadline fixed by the Anti-Corruption Act, the commission granted a penalty-free week. Declarants should not be fined for the commission’s technical failure, but the act makes those fines mandatory, and it is unclear under what authority a deadline set by Parliament was moved because a website could not cope.

Currently, the commission’s main website shows only a maintenance notice and its public portal returns an error. For an institution whose mandate is integrity, that is no small lapse. It holds the financial records of thousands of officials and politicians; citizens may fairly ask how securely it guards that data. A dark front page also invites impostors: in May, the commission had to warn that unofficial parties were circulating inaccurate instructions on its e-declaration system. The agency that polices integrity must first secure its own digital integrity.

A roadmap, in the open

The deeper problem is the absence of a route. Sri Lanka has had e-government strategies but never a lasting national ICT policy, and each survived only as long as the government that wrote it. Since 2015, each administration has shelved its predecessor’s work, and today’s GovTech effort has no published roadmap a citizen can read.

Standards fare no better. ICTA’s guidelines are advisory and checked by no one; even ICTA’s own site lacked a language switcher. Yet when every institution was told to adopt Sinhala Unicode, one clear directive did the job.

Sri Lanka needs a roadmap that outlives any cabinet: agreed across parties, with a minimum standard every institution must meet, a named body to check it, and at least 10 years before it is revised. And it must be built on open data, because a plan kept in a ministry drawer can be quietly discarded.

It took volunteers a full day to learn what the State should already know about itself. A public register of every Government website, showing its owner, email domain, and compliance, would let anyone check at any time. The budgets, contracts, and results of digital projects belong in the open too.

Winning back the screen

The predators did not need more money than the State, only more attention to the people they serve. The State can do the same. With a roadmap that survives elections and data open to scrutiny, the easiest service a Sri Lankan finds online need not be the one designed to harm them.

(The full Government Website Scorecard report can be accessed at the Lanka Data Foundation website)

(The writer is a policy analyst and Co-Founder of Muragala | Centre for Progressive Politics and Policy [CPPP] and can be contacted at h.dassanayake@muragala.lk)

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)