External Affairs Ministry launches Twitter Seva, expands social media outreach

External Affairs Ministry launched a ‘Twitter Seva’ service on Friday to expand its social media reach and centralise its grievance redressal mechanism by bringing over 200 social media handles including those of Indian Missions and regional passport offices under one platform.

Under the new service, a tweet to any Twitter handle of the Ministry will automatically land in the Twitter Seva platform which will provide for prompt resolution of the grievances.

The service brings together Twitter accounts of 198 Indian Missions abroad, 29 regional passport offices and eight other handles such as @MEAIndia, @Indiandiplomacy and @MEAQuery.Under the service, authorities concerned will be assigned to resolve problems and difficulties of people on a real-time basis, said MEA officials.

“With the adoption of Twitter Seva, our commitment to serve our people in India and across the globe in an enhanced, timely and transparent manner will take a new leap forward which will act as an umbrella platform of all Twitter handles,” Minister of State for External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup said at the launch event.

Speaking on the occasion, Twitter India’s Head of News and Government Raheel Khursheed said the new service will operate on a citizen-first approach. Asked about recent hacking of Twitter handles of several high profile personalities, Khursheed said their e-mail servers were hacked to get access to Twitter accounts.

He said a two-step authentication process has been suggested as part of added security feature for the Twitter handles.