The Modi government has decided to ban the use of Gmail or any other private email for official communication across all its organizations, and make it mandatory for them to migrate to email services provided by the National Informatics Centre (NIC).
Under the e-mail policy of the Government of India (GoI), each employee of the Central Government or any state/UT government staff using e-mail services of GoI will be provided two e-mail IDs, one based on designation for use in official communication and the other based on name for both official and personal communication. Not only will the employees be barred from using email services provided by any other service provider for official communication, but they also cannot provide details of the GoI email account to private e-mail service providers.
In a separate policy on use of IT resources in GoI organizations notified simultaneously, the government has empowered NIC to block content over the internet that is in contravention of provisions of the IT Act, 2000, or which may pose a security threat to the network. NIC may also block content which, in the opinion of the concerned organization, is “inappropriate or may adversely affect the productivity of the users”. The users will be mandated to use high security settings for social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook and not post offensive, threatening, obscene, copyright-infringing, defamatory, hateful, harassing, racist or sexist material.
As per the email policy notified by the Department of Electronics and IT (DeitY), forwarding of email from the official GoI ID to the official’s personal ID outside the GoI e-mail service will not be allowed. Though official email ID provided can be used to communicate with any other user, whether private or public, the users must exercise due discretion on the contents being sent as part of the email.
