New Delhi, October 29, 2013 (PTI): Wary of
cyber snooping, the government could ban e-mail services such as Gmail and
Yahoo for official communications by December this year in a move to safeguard its critical and
sensitive data.
“We are working on an e-mail policy. The policy willapply to all the central and state government employees using NIC. It
will come out in about two months time,” J Satyanarayana, Secretary of
Department of Electronics and Information Technology told PTI.
The government is expected to route all its
official communication through the official website NIC’s email service.
The Department of
Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY) is drafting a policy on email
usage for government offices and departments and the policy is almost ready.
The department is now
taking views from other ministries on it.
“E-mail policy of the
government of India, as this policy will be called, is almost ready and we are
taking views from other ministries on this. Our effort will be to
operationalise it by mid or end-December,” DEITY Secretary J Satyanarayana told
reporters on the sidelines of a CII summit.
According to official
sources, the policy seeks to protect the large amount of critical government
data.
It also aims to make it mandatory for
government offices to communicate only on the nic.in platform rather than
commercial email services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc.
The policy is expected to cover about 5-6 lakh Central and State government employees for using theemail service provided by National Informatics Centre (NIC).
On investments
required for the policy, Satyanarayana said: “We immediately require about Rs.
4-5 crore to ramp up the NIC infrastructure. But, the total investment needed
for the full operationability of the e-mail policy could be around Rs. 50-100
crore.”
This will also include
integrating the e-mails with cloud so that official data can be saved on a
cloud platform, which can then be easily shared with the concerned government
ministries and departments, he added.
The development comes
close on heels of concerns being raised by a section in the government,
especially intelligence agencies, over use of email services, provided by foreign firms (mostly US-based),
which have their servers located in overseas locations, making it difficult to
track if sensitive government data is being snooped upon.
The move also assumes significance in
light of the fallout of the
Snowden saga, which contended the US intelligence agencies used a secret
data-mining programme to monitor worldwide Internet data to spy on various
countries, including India.
Former technical contractor for National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency
Edward Snowden had leaked what was allegedly details of a top-secret American
mass surveillance programme, which led to countries analysing the safety of
their official Internet-supportedcommunication networks.
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