Govt announces email service for officials in English, Hindi

New Delhi: The government on Monday announced email service for its 5 million personnels in English and Hindi in accordance with the email policy.

The email policy bars the government employees from using private email services due to security reasons.

"As part of the mandate under the Digital India program, 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 Ministry of Electronics and IT said.

The primary domain for English email id will (at)gov (dot)in and for Hindi email id it will be sarkar(dot)bharat in Hindi script.

"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 said.

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

The announcement from MEITY comes about 10 days after Rajasthan government launched first email service for residents in the state.

The email service of the Rajasthan government has been developed by Jaipur based 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 under under Meity 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.

As per the statement, the new email service will have "enhanced security authentication mechanisms for users with geo-fencing and device mapping".