Government Migrates 16.68 Lakh Official Email Accounts to Zoho Cloud, Spends Rs. 180 Crore

The Government has migrated lakhs of official email accounts to the Zoho Cloud platform. On Wednesday, the Union Minister of State (MoS) and a key minister within the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Jitin Prasada, informed the Parliament about the migration and the associated expenditure. The move comes after the ministry announced in October 2025 that it plans to upgrade official email accounts to a cloud-based, secure, and scalable system, ditching the existing legacy system.

Government Moves Email Accounts to Zoho Cloud

Prasada told the Parliament, during the ongoing Budget Session, that 16.68 lakh email accounts have been successfully migrated to the Zoho Cloud platform. The total move resulted in an expenditure of Rs. 180 crore, the minister stated. At the same time, he added that the central government continues to use the National Informatics Centre's (NIC) email services, indicating the migration was only partway done.

Notably, this is the first time the Government has opted for a private player to secure the email services for various ministries and departments. TMC MPs Rachna Banerjee, Deepak Dev Adhikari, and Mala Roy have raised queries about the financial details of the move, The Economic Times reported.

In a written response, Prasada reportedly said that the payments are linked to the actual number of email accounts that have been migrated. Zoho is said to be charging between Rs. 170 and Rs. 300 per account per month, depending on the total cloud storage required. Additionally, the minister reportedly revealed that the mailbox sizes vary between 30GB and 100GB.

Prasada also highlighted that the reason behind the migration was to ensure that email accounts associated with ministries and departments have a “robust, sovereign, and secure official email system.” On the reason to select Zoho, the MoS reportedly revealed that the company was chosen as a master system integrator (MSI) via a “transparent and competitive bidding process” conducted on the Government e-Marketplace (GeM-CPPP). The process reportedly included proof of concept evaluation step with designated government users.

Despite the wide-scale migration, the minister stated that the Government continues to rely on NIC for official communication. The migration is described as a modernisation exercise to improve security and scalability.