NIC developing e-mail server for all govt officers: Ajay Kumar

Hyderabad: The NIC is building a massive server to boost capacity vis-a-vis official e-mail usage by central and state government officers, a senior official has said.

"NIC (National Informatics Centre) is developing an e-mail server for the whole government. Today, present e-mail server has kind of already exceeded its capacity. We are now creating a massive email server.

"Slowly and slowly, people are being on-boarded onto this email server," Ajay Kumar, Additional Secretary, Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, told PTI here.

"We do endeavour to make sure that all government officers use official one (email id).... All government officers, central and state. We will offer this facility to states also.

"Because, when you are using private servers, your data is going outside country, which may be of strategic importance. Therefore, official work should be done on official e-mail servers," he said.

States can have their own official e-mail servers or they can use central servers, the official said.

"NIC is the only agency (which has taken up job)...We have no objection if some other agency wants to do it as long as it is official. NIC is providing a service which can be availed," he said.

The government had on August 28 announced e-mail service for its five million personnel in English and Hindi in accordance with the e-mail policy, which bars government employees from using private e-mail services due to security reasons.

"As part of the mandate under the Digital India programme, government will provide a secure eMail service to all its officials for secure communication. As of now the service will be offered to five million users. Currently, the user base is 1.6 million," Ministry of Electronics and IT had said in a statement on August 28.