The Indian government has migrated lakhs of official email accounts from its legacy systems to Zoho’s cloud platform, in what amounts to one of the larger government IT moves in recent years. The transition covers employees across multiple central ministries, replacing older infrastructure that many officials had quietly complained about for years. Zoho, a Chennai-based software company, beat out several international vendors for the contract — a fact the government has been eager to point out. The migration has been rolling out in phases, though exact department-wise timelines haven’t been officially disclosed. It’s a bigger deal than the press releases make it sound.
There’s an obvious political angle here: choosing a homegrown platform over Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 fits neatly with the government’s “Atmanirbhar Bharat” push. Zoho does have the product to back it up — its mail and collaboration suite is used by millions of businesses globally, so this isn’t a compromise pick. That said, switching email platforms for hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats is genuinely hard, and early reports from some offices suggest the rollout hasn’t been completely smooth. Training gaps, legacy data migration hiccups, and the usual resistance to change are all real. None of that is unusual for a rollout this size, but it’s worth watching.
The longer-term question is whether this becomes the standard for all government email, or stays limited to central ministries. State governments are still largely on their own systems, some of them older and more precarious than anything at the centre. If Zoho’s performance holds up under this kind of institutional load, there’s a reasonable case for expanding the contract further. The government hasn’t announced anything beyond the current scope, which is probably wise — under promising on IT projects is a lesson learned the hard way. For now, the migration counts as a genuine step forward, even if the real test is a year from now.
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