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Lawyers suffer as NGT website remains offline 2 days after being hacked
The National Green Tribunal website, which was defaced by hackers in response to India’s surgical strikes, remained inaccessible for the second consecutive day on Wednesday.
The National Green Tribunal website, which was defaced by hackers in response to India’s surgical strikes, remained inaccessible for the second consecutive day on Wednesday.
“This site can’t be reached,” reads a message on the green panel’s website.
The National Informatics Centre had taken it offline after the hack, but NGT officials said they expected it become operational in another couple of days.
“We have already complained to the National Informatics Centre and the site is blocked as of now. We are in touch with them and hopefully the website would be restored in a day or two,” said an NGT official on condition of anonymity.
Read | Hackers deface NGT website, slam ‘surgical strikes’, Kashmir ‘killings’
The NGT officials said they were providing the causelists of cases to the NGT Bar Association, which is in turn circulating it to others.
A case has already been registered with the cyber cell at the Tilak Marg police station in this regard.
Litigants and lawyers, who accessed the website for a list of hearings scheduled, were having a tough time as they could not access important contents like daily orders or judgements.
Advocate Balendu Shekhar, who represents East Delhi Municipal Corporation in the green panel, said the NGT’s orders used to get uploaded daily by the evening but after the hacking episode, the site has been down for two days now.
“The biggest issue is of compliance of the NGT order. Non-availability of the judicial order leads to delay in implementation of the order. So there is always a threat of contempt looming large,” he said.
Another lawyer, Gautam Singh, said the NGT website was quite useful as it gave out the composition of bench, list of cases, daily orders, judgements or any latest announcements. “There is now a delay in execution of orders as we have to ask for the orders which were earlier available online,” he said.
Amul Mani Tripathi, a litigant, blamed the NGT officials for the problem and said he has filed a case but was totally unaware about when it would be listed for hearing.
