Swadeshi Mail

/2 min read
The Centre’s adoption of Zoho Mail is a push for digital self-reliance
Swadeshi Mail
(Illustration: Saurabh Singh) 

 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.

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