All government officials will have to stop using private e-mail like Gmail and Yahoo for security issues and shift to the one provided by the National Informatics Centre once it completes technology upgradation.
"... Although the policy has been circulated across all ministries and departments, there has been no special focus to ask users to migrate as the service is in the process of being upgraded. Once the service is upgraded, ministries and departments would be mandated to start using the government service," the Department of Electronics and IT (DeITY) told a parliamentary panel.
The department did not share any firm timeline for the technology upgradation.
The e-mail policy, issued in October 2014, bars government officials from using e-mail service of private players, mainly due to security reasons.
"The key triggers for releasing the e-mail policy was to protect and secure government data which as of today resides in servers like Gmail and Yahoo which are beyond the control of the government. Hence, security remains the primary motive for service upgradation," the department said.
The mandate is to provide e-mail IDs to 50 lakh users.
The key differentiator of the NIC service is it will have elements that will address requirements and expectations of the government both from the feature and security perspective, which cannot be expected from Gmail or Yahoo, the DeITY said.
The government will have full control of entire deployment of the e-mail service.
The service is being deployed with an open source software maintained by the NIC, which means the strategic control of the entire deployment will be with the government.
"The open-source deployment will give the government the flexibility to introduce or modify features as per expectations of government officials and the security guidelines introduced from time to time. Other services like Google or Yahoo operate on their own timelines and road map and will not accept requests from the Indian government," the DeITY said.
The department is working on e-mail features comparable to popular service offerings globally, which will be released soon.
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