K-P govt could not access their e-mails for over a week

IT directorate official says payment could not be made since private hosting company’s account was blocked

PESHAWAR: With modern communication increasingly dependent on digital tools, email prime amongst them, the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government was left using alternatives for nearly 10 days when their official email server went offline for over a week.

This was all due to the government’s failure to furnish timely payment of Rs134,000 to a private firm which hosts emails for the entire province.

Officials of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) government with knowledge of the outage told The Express Tribune that the private firm had disconnected the K-P government’s official email, halting digital communications between all government departments, directorates, attached departments and autonomous bodies of the provincial government.

“The emails were disconnected in the second last week of October and remained suspended until last Tuesday when the government finally managed to pay the company’s bills,” said a senior official of the K-P government close to the developments.

“The delays in the payment raise questions over the K-P government’s claims of shifting to a paperless environment and slogans of E-governance,” the official said while requesting not to be named.

Another official associated with an autonomous entity of the K-P government confirmed the email suspension since their work was primarily dependent on the official email.

“For the secretaries or other senior officials of the bureaucracy, it [email outage] would not be an issue since they rarely use their official emails. But we directly deal with the public through the official email which was suspended for more than a week,” the official said adding that the government did not issue any prior warning about the server suspension so that the departments could prepare.

“The Directorate of Information Technology should manage the server instead of a private firm which suspended it for delayed payments,” the official complained. The K-P government had set up a central data centre in 2014. Two years later in 2016, it shifted the provincial government’s main web portal from a private firm to the central data centre.

However, the email server is still handled by a private firm, another official said. “Data of the emails, sent or received by all the departments and government entities, has not been transferred from the private firm to the data centre,” the official said while requesting anonymity since he was not authorized to speak to the media on the matter.

He added that private firm had sent the government a copy of the unpaid bills. But when the government failed to clear the arrears in time, the company suspended the email server.

K-P Directorate of IT Director Bilal Jabbar, when asked about the issue, said that the bill had been paid and that the server has resumed working restoring official emails of the provincial department. “The company bank account was blocked by the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) due to which the money could not be transferred to their account in time,” Jabbar said.

When asked about the outstanding dues, the official said that the government owed Rs134,000 to the company which had been cleared.

Asked whether the email server would be shifted to the central data centre, Jabbar said that his directorate had asked all departments to save their emails to shift it them to data centre.

“The delay is from the departments’ side,” he said, adding that they expect to shift the server to the central data centre within a month.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 2^nd, 2017.