Recalling that the Public Records Act prohibits public records from being taken out of the country, the Centre on Tuesday cautioned Central and State government employees against use of private email services — particularly those hosted and operated from abroad — for official communication.
Use of web or email services hosted abroad for official communication amounts to contravention of Section 4 of the Public Records Act, as all such data get stored in servers based outside India.
Section 9 of the Act prescribes a punishment of up to five years for the offence.
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In an official memorandum, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said there was increased security risk in accessing information over the Internet as “[some] adversaries have launched targeted attacks to steal or damage the information for different purposes and interests.”
The advisory was issued to 87 offices across the country in compliance with a Delhi High Court order on a PIL petition moved by former BJP leader K.N. Govindacharya.
“It has been observed that a number of officials in the ministries/departments in the Central and State governments are using private mail services, particularly hosted and operated from outside India, for official communications. Such official communications are [pertaining to the] government and also public records. It is to mention that data pertaining to such emails and web services is stored by these service providers outside India and is fully under their control,” said the note released on November 27.
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Raising suspicion that there is a possibility of leakage of information, the note stated: “At the time of any security breach incident or data loss, it becomes very difficult to obtain data from those service providers.”