Civil servants in India to get IDN e-mails

The Ministry of Electronic and Information Technology in India plans to issue Internationalised Domain Name (IDN) e-mail addresses to around five million civil servants in the country. In line with the plan, government employees are to be allocated Hindi-script e-mail addresses – in the format @सरकार.भारत (in English translation, government.india). The main motivation behind this decision seems to be related to the government’s desire to bring government data under its jurisdiction, as much of such data ‘resides on servers outside India and on servers beyond the control of the government of India’.