In a bid to protect official data from leaking, the government in Rajasthan has taken the precautionary step of disallowing the use of international email service providers for government work.
According to government guidelines, officials will not be able to use Gmail, Yahoo, and Rediff for official communication.
"The government officials will have to use government email service platform for any official communication, for which the state government needs a go ahead from the federal government to make its own email domain."
As many as 800,000 government officials will be impacted by the move.
“So far we were working on international email providers but now we will have our own platform for official communication,” a government official told media.
Using international platform often compromised the official data, hence it was important to ban the use of these platforms, the official added.
Just few days ago the Indian Home Ministry had said that it will be disassociating its functions from the worldwide web, directing government staff to stop using social media on official devices, including cell phones and computers.
“No classified government information can be stored on private cloud services (Google drive, Dropbox, iCloud etc) and doing so may make you liable for penal action, in case of data leakage,” according to a 24-page official document released by the Union Home Ministry.
The new directive is applicable to all personnel, including employees, contractual staff, consultants, partners, and third-party staff, numbering in their thousands across the country.
The ministry has clearly stated classified data "should be encrypted before it is copied onto removable storage media designated to store classified information".
The new directive is part of Indian cyber Crime Coordination Centre Scheme implemented by Indian Home Ministry at an estimated cost of $61 million.