Modi arms his 5 million staff with secure email

As part of its digital push, the Centre on Monday announced email service for its 5 million staff in English and Hindi.

With this, government employees are barred from using private email services due to security reasons. “As part of the mandate under the Digital India programme, the government will provide a secure email service to all its officials for secure communication. As of now the service will be offered to 5 million users. Currently, the user base is 1.6 million,” a statement from the Ministry of Electronics and IT said.

“The primary trigger behind the policy was government data which resides on servers outside India and on servers beyond the control of the Government of India,” the statement added.

The email service will be the largest of its kind for the government with a user base of 5 million, the statement said.

The announcement comes about 10 days after the Rajasthan government launched the first email service for residents in the state. The email service of the Rajasthan government has been developed by Jaipurbased Data Infosys. A Rajasthan government officer involved in the project said that the state government will be operating and maintaining the entire project because of security reasons.

The new email service started claims to provide rich user experience with a streamlined browser interface that gives natural conversation, enables drag and drop, easy-to-customise filters, management and search of large in-boxes of email and voice-mail messages, multiple calendars, contacts and task lists etc.