E-mail policy for govt employees likely in two months

GOvt employees will be allowed to use official e-mail IDs only for official communication

The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEIT) is likely to finalise an e-mail policy within next two months as part of the government’s safeguard measures to critical data.

The government employees will then be allowed to use the official e-mail IDs only for official communication.

“We are coming up with an e-mail policy, which regulates uses of e-mail by all the government employees who are accessing government infrastructure (the NIC facility).

The draft has been made ready and we are going for inter ministerial consultation very soon,” said DeitY secretary J Satyanarayana, said here today. The policy will address the security concerns related to communications and data.

Besides, the government is also working on an Internet usage policy, which regulates the use of Internet by government officials.

“There is also an acceptable Internet usage policy. We need to ensure that the Internet is not misused, so to prevent misuse of Internet, we have come up with this complementary policy,” he added.

The development comes in the wake of increasing usage of private email services such as Gmail, Yahoo mail and others by government employees which exposes sensitive information of the country to the risk of leakage, as the servers of most of these service providers are located outside of India.