National Defense Fund is an innovative concept. Donate Rs. 1 per day for the Indian Army – This is the noble quotation circulating on the internet. Personally, I also managed to accumulate few donations for the Indian Army. Everything is great but the website Govt. is maintaining to collect the donations has a lot of bugs.
Because of the above reason I failed to convince a few people to donate to the Army who feared more about security warning messages appeared on the National Defense Fund website.
No proper SSL certificate
Every website which runs on https protocol must have a valid SSL certificate to provide trust to the users visiting that site. Even though Govt. of India manages the https://ndf.gov.in site, it lacks a valid SSL certificate.
Why National Defense Fund website lacks SSL certificate?
Every https based site must get SSL certificate from the certificate issuing authorities like VeriSign, Google, etc. to offer SSL encryption and authentication to the user data, and They have to pay Rs. 10,000 to 1 Lakh per year to get the certificate.
For example, if the ndf.gov.in site got SSL certificate by paying Rs. 1,00,000 for the period of 2015-2016 it must renew it again by paying the same amount to the VeriSign or Google for 2016-2017. Otherwise, the security certificate will be expired and the web browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox starts showing “Your connection is not secured” errors.
Immediately after seeing those errors people think the site is not secured or it is fake. Indirectly it affects the trust on the website and government. Earlier I noticed the same issue with APSRTC Official site. They didn’t apply for SSL certificate even though they implemented https protocol on their site.
Whatever the issue, as an end user you no need not worry about your security. The site is 100% Genuine; you can proceed by clicking “Advanced” button and select “Add Exception.”
The National Defense Fund website also lacks Credit Card and debit card payment options.
But I personally liked the concept and donated a few bucks for the noble cause. So don’t hesitate to donate for the Indian Army Welfare.