The Central Government has shifted approximately 16.68 lakh official email accounts to a cloud-based platform managed by Zoho, with the total expenditure reaching ₹180.10 crore so far. This update was shared by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in the Lok Sabha on April 1.
The migration process has been executed through the National Informatics Centre (NIC), which appointed Zoho as the Master System Integrator. The company is responsible for delivering a cloud-based email solution tailored for government users. Zoho was selected after a competitive bidding process conducted via the Government e-Marketplace (GeM-CPPP), which also included a proof of concept involving shortlisted vendors and government user groups.
According to the government, this initiative is aimed at building a secure, sovereign email ecosystem for ministries and departments. It ensures that complete ownership of data and intellectual property remains with the government.
In terms of pricing, the cost per email account ranges between ₹170 and ₹300 per month, depending on the mailbox storage capacity, which varies from 30 GB to 100 GB. The payment model is based on the total number of accounts successfully migrated to the platform.