No Gmail; govt employees told to use only official email

No Gmail; govt employees told to use only official email

KP.Saikiran@timesgroup.com

Thiruvananthapuram:  03.03.2021 

As part of allaying concerns about government data being shared to private hands and to ensure secure communication between officials, the state government has asked all its employees to switch over to government email services instead of using private ones like Gmail or Yahoo mail.

According to the circular issued by the electronics and information technology department in this regard on February 19 this year (accessed by TOI), the employees have been recommended to use emails under the domain “gov.in”. As per the circular, the National Informatics Centre (NIC) would create two different IDs, one based on the designation of the officer and the other based on the name, on the basis of the requests from the government organisations and departments. Designation-based IDs will be created for those officers who are dealing with the public directly. An officer will be designated for handling the email address in all the departments.

An officer will have to handover the designation-based IDs to his successor officer when he moves out of that post. However, the name-based IDs will remain with the officers during their entire tenure in the government service. Any email account inactive for 90 days will be deactivated after intimating the concerned department, and if it remains inactive without any communication for180 days, it would be permanently deleted. The electronics and IT department has specifically instructed that other than the government websites, the email IDs assigned under this domain should not be used to subscribe for any other service through any other entity. The NIC has also been asked to keep track of the email IDs assigned to each department so that the communication history can be tracked.

The state government’s latest communique is based on the email policy of the Centre issued on February 18, 2015, by which the use of private email services was banned for official purposes. The Centre had come up with email policy as a remedy to the concerns over the foreign servers of the private email service providers and allegations of email snooping by foreign countries.

The ministry of electronics and information technology had then made the policy applicable to all the employees under the union government, and also those states and union territories that choose to go by the policy in future. As per the policy, the domain email.gov.in of the NIC was decided as the official email of the government. This domain would be used for all official communications by all the government organizations, except those dealing with national security.

The state government’s latest communique is based on the email policy of the Centre issued on February 18, 2015, by which the use of private email services was banned for official purposes