
When Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare Jagat Prakash Nadda recently said that he had switched to Indian email service provider Zoho Mail for all official communications, he was following 12 lakh Central government employees who had already been migrated from the National Informatics Centre’s system. What looks like a routine software swap is, in fact, India’s push for digital self-reliance.
Zoho Mail, built by Chennai-headquartered Zoho Corporation, is a cloud-based, ad-free email and collaboration suite. It offers domain-based hosting, shared mailboxes, and integration with Zoho’s broader productivity tools. The service has long pitched itself as a privacy-and-price-conscious alternative to foreign giants. Compared with Gmail, Zoho offers bigger attachment limits—up to 1GB per file, versus Gmail’s 25MB— along with features like extended recall of sent mails and bundled calendar, task, notes, and team-stream functions. Its paid plans too undercut Google’s, starting at a fraction of the cost.
The Centre’s adoption of Zoho comes after several rounds of security audits and amid heightened anxiety over data sovereignty. In June 2025, a global breach exposed more than 16 billion credentials, prompting the Indian government to issue advisories for shifts towards more secure, indigenous systems. By selecting Zoho, the government is signalling trust in a homegrown product at national scale.
Nvidia’S Supercomputer
Nvidia has launched what it terms a personal supercomputer, an extraordinarily powerful workstation that looks like a small rectangular box but packs within enormous processing power. Called DGX Sparks, it has one petaflop of processing power. The regular consumer is not its target market. AI developers, scientific researchers, as well as others will find it useful for their applications.
31 Oct 2025 - Vol 04 | Issue 45
Indians join the global craze for weight loss medications
Google’S Mega Investment
With mammoth data centres being the norm for AI companies, India is now seeing investments on that front. Google in partnership with the Adani Group is setting up one in Visakhapatnam for $15 billion. Expected to be completed by 2030, it will propel India’s AI ambitions. The project comes with energy infrastructure and will create almost 2 lakh jobs.
Social GPT
Leaks doing the rounds online say that OpenAI is planning to bring direct messaging between users into its flagship generative AI product, ChatGPT. What this could mean is that it is entering the arena of social media. Rumours also claim that the other elements of a social media platform, like usernames and profile pictures, are also being tested.