(Image source from: Modi to provide desi email service to his ministers)

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his team of ministers might heavily bet on Facebook and Twitter when it comes to reaching out to the masses. But when it comes to communicating things officially, they usually rely on Gmail, Yahoo or other email providers based outside India. But all that is to change now.

Per Hindustan Times report "a new draft email policy by the National Informatics Centre" states that all government officials and ministers must use the NIC email for all their communication. What more, none of them will be allowed to forward email from this id to their personal email ids.

This has been proposed by Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) and is likely to get a Cabinet approval by month-end.

Government communication, barring those of Ministry of Defence and External Affairs, will be done using the platform of the National Informatics Centre (NIC), a source reveals.

Both the Defence Ministry and External Affair will have their own separate secure email server. The move comes amid concerns about rising cybercrime and hacking incidents.

DeitY has already drafted the policy on use of email for government offices and departments and views and comments of ministries are being taken on this.

The new policy seeks to safeguard huge amount of critical government data. So it has proposed to make it mandatory for government offices to communicate only on nic.in platform, and not on other commercial email services Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, etc.

The policy, if passed, will cover about 5-6 lakh Central and state government employees for using the email service provided by NIC.

To make sure the NIC platform operates smoothly, the DeitY will need about Rs 4-5 crore to boost its infrastructure. Apart from that, another huge investment of around Rs 50-100 crore would be required to operate this policy and that will includeg integrating emails with cloud so that official data can be saved on a cloud platform and can then be easily shared with the concerned government ministries and departments.

A report on NSA snooping revealed that India was the fifth most-spied upon country whereby the US collects 6.3 billion pieces of computer data from India each year.

More recently, a Washington Post report revealed that NSA had also spied on BJP just four months before Obama's visit to India in 2010.

In view of the NSA revelations, it's nonplussing that the government has asked it's employees not to use Gmail or Yahoo for official communication. It remains to be seen how it will be enforced in government offices.

AW: Suchorita Choudhury