PUNE: Taking a cue from the effective use of social media by India Against Corruption for mustering support for social crusader Anna Hazare during his recent indefinite fast for a strong Lokpal bill, the department of information technology (DIT) has advised all government departments to make social media part of their day-to-day work to communicate with citizens.
The DIT has framed guidelines for use of social media for government organisations, which include publicising use of social networking, creating blogs on important initiatives, updating decisions relevant to public through 'Twitter', sharing copies of government orders, forms, etc, on these sites, among others.
"The civil society is making effective use of social media. But in the absence of a framework on use of social media, government organisations have restricted its usage. Government officials are unsure whether to use it for official purposes or not. Hence, framing guidelines for usage was important as the medium is highly effective, speedy and reaches a large number of citizens," Shankar Aggarwal, additional secretary, DIT, told TOI on Thursday.
The DIT will take approval from the competent authority for the guidelines and within three months they will be implemented, Aggarwal said.
"The guidelines also advise employees on using the social media ethically because there is a great possibility of misusing it as well," he added.
The guidelines aims to make possible a meaningful public participation for formulation of public policy. Seeking information, issue-based as well as generic interaction, generating awareness and educating people on national action plans and implementation of strategies must be part of the social media.
The DIT in the social media guidelines has quoted 'comScore', a marketing research company, that said, "The social networking site 'Orkut' has 18 million users and is a favourite among tier II and tier III cities while 'Facebook' has 17 million users in India and is the highest growing networking site. Its users have almost doubled in the last six months. Besides, 'Twitter' has 4.5 million users in India and is rapidly becoming popular. It has also said that the highest number of active social media audience in India is in the age group of 15 to 24 years."
In the guidelines, the DIT has said that, "Employees are free to post response in their personal capacity. At the same time, it is mandatory that while they do so, they must clearly identify themselves, confidential information must not be divulged and should not be seen to represent 'official view' unless authorised to do so."
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