Saturday, 28 September 2013
The Central government has told the Delhi High Court it is working on a comprehensive policy on email use for official communication. Under the new policy, central government officials may soon be banned from using Gmail, Yahoo or any other email services that are based abroad to prevent transfer of data.
The submission was made before the court
following a petition filed by former Bharatiya Janata Party leader N.
Govindacharya stating that the use of e-mail accounts whose servers were
outside India and transfer of nation’s official data using this medium
was violative of the Public Records Act. According to the petitioner,
sensitive data were stored on servers outside of the country and could
be accessed by the foreign governments.
Govindacharya's counsel Viraag Gupta stated that government officials were using social networking sites, like Facebook, Gmail,
etc for official communications instead of using the government server
provided by the National informatics Centre. Gupta also submitted copies
of official contact information of various ministries as proof.
The new policy will be formulated
according to the provisions of the Public Records Act that lays down
guidelines for management, administration and preservation of records of
various government agencies.
