Govt may ban Gmail, Yahoo! for official use

Move aims at safeguarding government data

Aiming to safeguard sensitive government data, the Centre is planning to ban the use of popular e-mail services like Gmail and Yahoo for official communication. 

The Department of Electronics and Information Technology is likely to move a cabinet note by the end of this month making it mandatory that all official communications should be through National Informatics Centre (NIC) platform only. 

All government communication, barring those of defence and external affairs ministries, will be done using the NIC platform, sources said adding that the government is expected to route official communication through the NIC’s e-mail service.

While the Defence Ministry has its own separate secure email server, the External Affairs Ministry may follow suit.

The move comes amid concerns about rising cybercrime and hacking incidents.

 Earlier this week, five million usernames and passwords of Google were reported to have been leaked online by Russian hackers.

The Department of Electronics and Information Technology has drafted the policy on use of e-mail for government offices and departments and views and comments of ministries concerned are being sought on this, sources said.

The policy seeks to protect large amount of critical government data and aims to make it mandatory for government offices to communicate only on nic.in platform and not on commercial e-mail services like Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail etc.