The Union government has decided to ban the access of private email services including Gmail for official communication across all its organisations.The Modi government has made it mandatory for all its departments and organisations to migrate to email services provided by the National Informatics Centre (NIC).
Under the e-mail policy of the Government of India (GoI) notified on February 18, each employee of the government of India 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.
This will not only restrict the government employees from using email services provided by any other service provider for official communication, but they are also barred to provide details of the GoI email account to private e-mail service providers.
In a separate policy notification issued on the same date, 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 government will install high security settings which will be mandatory for the users to access social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.
It will also restrict the employees from posting offensive, obscene, threatening, copyright-infringing, hateful, defamatory, harassing, racist, or sexual material.
As per the email policy notified by the department of electronics and IT (DeitY), forwarding of email from the official government ID to the official’s personal ID outside the GoI e-mail service will not be allowed.
