India may ban private email for official government communications soon

The Indian government is all set to ban the use of private email services for official communications. There will be no more official communications from government officials in India using the likes of Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail, keeping in mind the sensitivity of data being shared.

The Hindu Business Line has reported that the government is mulling putting an end to the practice of using private email providers to send official communication by the end of the year. J Satyanarayana, Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) said_, “E-mail policy of the Government of India, as this will be called, is almost ready and we are taking views from other ministries on this. Our effort will be to operationalise the policy by mid or end-December.”_

Use NIC instead (Image credit: Reuters)

This move will make it mandatory for government officials to use only the NIC (nic.in) platform for official communication purposes. This will ensure that critical data is sent and received on the government controlled NIC platform.

Of course, data security is the key reason why the government may be feeling compelled to take this step. Only recently it had been revealed that US intelligence had been accused of spying on the top echelon of world leaders, including the likes of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In another report, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s office assured that it had nothing to worry about since Singh did not possess either a mobile phone or a personal email ID.

Of course, other government officials could be spied upon and since some of them use the likes of Gmail and Yahoo! for official purposes, the risk of this data being spied upon or compromised gets higher. However, to develop the NIC infrastructure, the government will require a cool Rs 5 crore to start with. “But the total investment needed for the full e-mail policy could be around Rs 50-100 crore [over a time period>,” Satyanarayan said. This policy will hopefully cover six lakh Central and State Government employees and there is also talk of using cloud services to save official data.