A public interest litigation (PIL) filed by advocate Raja Vikrant Sharma on June 23 states that Chandigarh’s Directorate of Higher Education (DHE) e-Admission portal was functioning without SSL/HTTPS encryption, requiring applicants to submit sensitive information, including bank details, Aadhaar numbers, and biometric data, over an insecure and unencrypted system.
http://spicindia.com dated February 10, 2026, showing the website without HTTPS/SSL encryption.Most IT systems have reached end of life, reveals RTI: An RTI response, seen by MediaNama and received by the petitioner from Chandigarh’s Department of Information Technology, revealed that the department has no separate itemised budget for SSL/HTTPS certificates, cybersecurity infrastructure, or security audits. Instead, these expenses are folded into the consolidated e-Governance and IT infrastructure budget.
The annual budget allocation is:
- Rs. 17.1 crore for FY 2024-25
- Rs. 15.37 crore for FY 2025-26
The RTI also disclosed that most of the IT infrastructure at the UT Data Centre has reached its “end of life”, with fresh procurement still “under progress”. It further stated that, rather than following a standing SOP for cybersecurity audits, the department has only empanelled a security auditor for FY 2026-27, who conducts audits of websites on an ad hoc, request-based basis.
What sections are cited in the PIL? The PIL, accessed by MediaNama, claims that the architecture of these websites violates Articles 14, 19, 21, and 38 of the Constitution; Section 43A of the Information Technology Act, 2000; the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act; the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023; and government accessibility mandates, including the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites and Apps (GIGW) 3.0 and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
SSL certificates are not feasible at present, says Chandigarh Administration: In a short note filed before the High Court, the UT Administration said that implementing SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) on the admission server is “not feasible” at present because the application runs on “legacy infrastructure”. The administration said that once the application is migrated to the upgraded State Data Centre, full SSL security will be implemented. As an interim measure, the UT Administration claimed that applicant data is protected through application-level and database-level encryption, with all stored data encrypted at rest.
Fixing SSL certificates on the remaining 33 websites will take 5–6 months. The administration also stated that 94 of its 127 government websites, portals, and mobile applications are already secured with HTTPS, with a list appended as an annexure. It added that the remaining 33 websites will be migrated once the ongoing upgrade of the State Data Centre (SDC) is completed, a process the administration estimates will take five to six months.
Why is HTTPS important? HTTPS uses…
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