A Russian regional government has blocked access to news sites and social networks in its offices in order to make its civil servants working instead of chating and flooding.

      The authors of the initiative believe that it will help to boost the quality and efficiency of the government’s work as the officials sometimes spend up to 20 per cent of their work hours hanging out on the web.

      According to Aleksandr Torba, deputy chairman of government in Russia’s westernmost exclave of Kaliningrad, the access to news websites has been limited to almost all the employees of the government, except the press-service.

      Earlier the civil servants have been blocked from the access to some social networks. Torba says it brought a positive result. Still, the politician finds it significant to add that it was an uneasy decision, as it has become harder for the officials to search necessary information and be informed about the latest news.

      According to researches of Entensys company in 2010, more than 20% of the Internet traffic during working hours in Russia is spent on social networking services. At the average, Russian clerks spend from 40 minutes to 2 hours of their work time on reading posts and chating.