MeitY mandates NIC email system, migrates 12.68 lakh official accounts to Zoho Cloud

The Government has clarified that all official communication from Ministries and Departments must continue to use email services provided by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), reaffirming the importance of a secure and sovereign communication infrastructure.

Responding in Parliament, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Jitin Prasada said the Government, through NIC, has onboarded Zyker Technologies’ Zoho as the Master System Integrator (MSI) for a cloud-based email platform upgrade. The partnership aims to ensure seamless migration of existing official accounts and access to modern productivity tools including word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, as part of a unified collaboration suite developed in India.

So far, around 12.68 lakh user accounts across Ministries and Departments have been migrated to the new cloud platform.

Bidding and compliance

The selection process was conducted via the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) platform, involving comparative bid evaluation and Proof-of-Concept trials with shortlisted vendors and designated government user groups. The project adheres to Make in India requirements and guarantees that all data and related intellectual property remains fully owned by the Government.

Online feedback has also been collected from users post-migration to evaluate performance and ease of use.

Security and data protection

The Minister highlighted that robust security checks were completed to ensure safe deployment of the system. These include:

• A comprehensive security audit by STQC (May 2024) • A second full security audit by C-DAC (August 2025)

The contract enforces strict data sovereignty, with the primary and disaster-recovery data centres physically located within India. It explicitly bars any data sharing or replication outside national borders. The service provider, Zoho, is a registered Indian entity and remains fully subject to Indian jurisdiction.

“The Government recognises the critical importance of having a robust, sovereign and secure official email system,” the Minister noted, underscoring continuity-of-service safeguards embedded into the contract.