Delhi HC asks government to formulate an email policy within 4-weeks

New Delhi: The Delhi High Court has directed the government to formulate an email policy within four weeks in compliance with the Public Records Act.

Raising concern over cyber snooping, the court asked why sensitive information was being shared on e-mail services.

The ruling came based on a PIL on which lawyer Virag Gupta argued upon an NIA advertisement seeking information about Hyderabad blasts on Gmail.

The government is contemplating to 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. 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 e-mail 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 the email 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.