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4 weeks ago
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Over the past one year, all 12 lakh e-mail addresses of Central government employees, including those of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), have migrated from a National Informatics Centre-based system to a platform developed by Zoho, officials told The Hindu. Zoho is headquartered in Tenkasi, Tamil Nadu.
A senior official said Zoho’s suite has also been activated to ensure that government employees do not use open source applications to create word files, spreadsheets and presentations.
Though the suite was available earlier, not many government employees were using it. “It was found that many government employees were using open source tools, which could compromise security of files, and it was decided to make them aware and display its features prominently on the internal mail platform,” said the official.
On October 3, the Union Ministry of Education issued an order nudging officials to use the Zoho suite “in alignment with the Government of India’s broader vision of transforming the nation from a service economy into a product nation, and in pursuit of building a self-reliant ecosystem in technology, hardware, and software solutions”.
It said the Zoho Office Suite was already incorporated in the NIC mail system and “by embracing Zoho’s indigenous office productivity tools, we take a bold step in the Swadeshi movement, empowering India to lead with home-grown innovation, strengthen digital sovereignty, and secure our data for a self-reliant future.”
Another official added that the domain name of the e-mails remains the same - nic.in or gov.in, but the host where the data are stored and processed has changed from NIC to Zoho. The private firm was awarded the contract in 2023 for seven years, the official added.
The NIC, established in 1976 under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), is the technology partner of the Central government and provides technology-driven solutions to both Central and State governments.
When asked about the security framework of the said services, the official added, “We took reports from security agencies and bodies such as NIC and CERT-In [Computer Emergency Response System-India], while SQSs [Software Quality Systems] regularly audit the Zoho platform. We have ensured that the data are safe and secure.”
Former IAS officer K.B.S Sidhu pointed out that before full-scale migration, robust data protection should be guaranteed.
“There can be no in-principle objection to the government championing an indigenous suite from Zoho. However, end-to-end encryption and probably robust, independently audited security of data centres located on Indian soil must be a condition precedent, given the rising sophistication of state and non-state hackers. Before large-scale government adoption — covering Cabinet memoranda and other national security papers — and the inevitable private-sector follow-on due to official endorsement, these protections must be fully implemented and independently vetted. The product is promising, but the remaining gaps must be closed first,” the former Punjab Special Secretary said.
Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu, when questioned by an X user about privacy features of Arattai, Zoho’s messaging app, said on October 10: “Our entire SAS business is based on the trust that we DO NOT access customer data and we do not use it for selling stuff to them. End-to-end encryption is a technical feature and that is coming. Trust is far far more precious and we are earning that trust daily in the global market. We will continue to fulfil that trust of every user of our product everywhere.”
Mr. Vembu was appointed to the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) led by National Security Adviser Ajit Doval on February 3, 2021.
On February 21, 2023, the Digital India Corporation (DIC), a not-for-profit company set up by the MeitY, invited bids from private players to select a cloud service provider to “operate, manage and migrate existing projects as well as future projects.”
The bid was floated months after the November 23, 2022 cyberattack at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi. The ransomware attack crippled the servers and e-hospital services at the country’s premier public healthcare centre for more than a month.
Last week, several Union Ministers announced on X that they have shifted to Zoho’s email services. However, the shift by Ministers, including Home Minister Amit Shah, was private in nature, and their official email correspondence remained under the NIC’s gov.in or nic.in domains, an IT official said. “It’s their personal email that they are publicising, and they are entitled to that,” the official said. Home Minister Amit Shah’s email address contains a reference to the BJP, apparently not constituting an official government inbox.
The scope of the bid included migrating the email services of government employees, handled by the NIC so far, to a private player. Though the government never announced it, Chennai-based business solutions provider Zoho was selected to handle the email services.
Zoho representatives did not respond to questions from The Hindu on the processes being followed to migrate government email inboxes to its software.
