Migration Of Over 12 Lakh Govt Accounts To Zoho Complete, Centre Tells Lok Sabha
The shift aims to ensure that ownership of all data and intellectual property generated during the arrangement remains with the government, as stipulated in its contract with Zoho.
The Centre informed the Lok Sabha that it has migrated nearly 12.68 lakh official email accounts across various ministries and departments to a Zoho-based platform.
Of these, about 7.45 lakh accounts belong to Central government employees, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Jitin Prasada said in a written reply to a question by Trinamool Congress MP Abhishek Banerjee.
“The number of accounts migrated to the Zoho platform is around 12.68 lakh, which includes 7.45 lakh Central Government employees,” Prasada stated.
He added that the migration was carried out through the National Informatics Centre (NIC), the official email service provider for government ministries and departments. The Central Government employs approximately 50.14 lakh people, he noted.
The shift aims to ensure that ownership of all data and intellectual property generated during the arrangement remains with the government, as stipulated in its contract with Zoho. Provisions for continuity and rollback have also been built into the agreement.
“To achieve this, the government, through NIC, selected Zoho as the Master System Integrator (MSI) to provide a robust cloud-based email solution capable of supporting all government users. The model ensures professional upgrades, seamless migration of existing accounts, and integration with modern office productivity tools such as word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software,” Prasada said.
MeitY had floated a tender in 2023 to migrate government accounts from NIC’s email system to a secure cloud-based platform, which Zoho won. However, Prasada did not disclose details on costs, including software licenses, infrastructure, training, and recurring expenses since FY 2023–24, which Banerjee had sought.
“The security architecture of the email platform has been rigorously defined to protect critical government data. The solution mandates encryption of all email data both at rest and in transit, with end-to-end encryption using RSA-256 and TLS 1.3 standards,” Prasada added.
