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Govt to soon unveil an 'email' policy for officials

Policy to mandate usage of official email only apart from other dos and donts

BS Reporter Mumbai
To ensure all government employees use only official email while communicating over the internet, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) is working on an ‘email’ policy.

This 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.

According to a government official in the know, the policy is being drafted and will mandate government employees to use official email hosted on the state-owned National Informatics Centre (NIC) servers.

“In the past, the government had come out with various advisories to tell officials across ministries and departments about using NIC email only. However, there has not been much adherence.” Therefore, a proper policy on email usage is now being formulated by the department, which will be approved by the Cabinet and will have to be followed in letter and spirit.

The policy will also contain a list of do’s and don’ts for government servants on how to register email ids as different patterns are being used currently.

“It will also mandate what kind of security measures should be followed by the user and NIC,” said department’s secretary J Satyanarayana. He added that the policy has been in the works for almost two-three months now and will take another two months to be finalised. “Since it will be applicable across the government, there needs to be proper deliberations on it.”

A large number of government officials, including offices of Union ministers, rely on private email services to communicate with each other. Even though the government continues to transact mainly through paper files, the usage of emails is growing although at a slow pace.

According to experts, the need to use official email becomes utmost important in the wake of recent revelations about the US having surveillance programmes such as PRISM to monitor communication of non-residents. Most of the private email service providers have their servers located outside India.

The Economic Times reported on Friday that the government plans to notify 500,000 employees, barring them from email service providers such as Gmail whose servers are based in the US, and instead asking them to stick to the official email service provided by NIC.

Sivarama Krishnan, executive director, PricewaterhouseCoopers said the policy is a right move though it might have come late in the day.

“There is an urgent need to maintain confidentiality of government data looking at the rising cyber crime in the country.” He added that however, once the rules are set, compliance comes easy in government. “But it remains to be seen how states adopt as centre has no direct jurisdiction there.”

The government is also in discussion to work out a framework which will classify the kind of information that can be sent over email on lines of the Official Secrets Act in order to sensitise officials about the dos and donts of communicating online. This move is being spearheaded by the ministry of home affairs.

While the number of cyber attacks on the government websites has shot up significantly over the last one year, NIC is also in the process of overhauling its email system to build in the required infrastructure and capability to enable increasing usage by government employees.
 

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First Published: Aug 31 2013 | 12:43 AM IST

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