Same with digilocker.

I'm not against old-looking websites with lots of text. If done well, I think I even prefer it to nice looking modern pages with almost no information on them. We are, after all, having this discussion on HN.

The websites of Japanese mobile providers strike me as similar (I don't have any experience with Japanese government webpages, or probably any other Japanese websites). I found some of those had a similar vibe, which seemed very dated to me, however, I assumed that was a style choice rather than being old. Could be something similar going on for Indian sites. They're just not targeted at my design sensibilities.

As an addition, I thought most of the confusingness about indianvisaonline.gov.in wasn't in the web-design, but in the questions. I've found similar frustrating options on some lovely looking websites, or even paper forms. When forms are for important things, extra effort should be put in to make them as clear and obvious as possible. Perhaps the general rule for our current situation would be that the more important the form, the less intuitive it is. The Indian government isn't alone in this.

Does anyone have hopes AI will make things better for us in this area?

That is true. Organizations have long been surrendering cognitively to outsourcing, consulting, and brand names. They buy systems they do not understand and delegate requirements they cannot verify. Then, rather than reducing existing problems, new ones simply emerge.

It is not so much about bureaucracy as it is about the factionalism that commonly appears in organizations behind these types of websites. In the end, avoidance of responsibility becomes the primary imperative of the program. The core issue is that there needs to be one person who takes responsibility, but no one does, because no one thinks about the planning that oversees the entire UX. Someone must take responsibility for the UX flow, and this is the typical pattern that emerges when no one does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik9IeChLqEk (think it was this one)

P.S. I think US is worse in every aspect. Try booking a US Visa appointment. Also as someone who has done both, Indian tax filing is significantly better as compared to the US where a government site doesn't exist. The worst offender in India was the driving license portal. (Older forms did use to be a weird excel UI and getting it to work on libre office was a nightmare I abandoned)

- tcs is the most mediocre software development company there is

- if they instead gave contracts to startups in bangalore / mumbai etc, they would do a far far better job at ui / ux

Seriously though, it becomes a problem when under the tiniest load it crashes between page loads losing state when the server restarts.

But I mean, the reason is rather obvious. Many things are built via the tender system. You're entirely depending on the altruism of the lowest bidder. Things which were built with a better procurement process are good.