Madhya Pradesh Makes Zoho Mail Mandatory for Government Officers and Employees

The Madhya Pradesh government has made Zoho Mail mandatory for all its officers and employees, according to a report in The Hitavada dated 13 October. The decision was finalised at a high-level meeting in Bhopal between the Madhya Pradesh State Electronics Development Corporation (MPSEDC) and the National Informatics Centre (NIC). The report did not name a specific official or department as having issued the directive and did not give a deadline for completing the migration.

The government cited a surge in cyber attacks and concerns about unauthorised access to sensitive official data as the reasons. The newspaper described the move as part of a national project led by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the NIC, aimed at building a secure, self-reliant digital ecosystem and reducing dependence on foreign cloud providers such as Google and Microsoft.

For users, the change is largely behind the scenes. The Hitavada reported that email addresses with domains such as mp.gov.in and nic.in will remain unchanged, and only the back-end infrastructure will shift to Zoho’s cloud. Each officer is to receive a dedicated inbox with secure cloud storage. The newspaper described Zoho as an Indian private IT company whose servers are located in India and operate under NIC’s strategic control, and said the platform follows CERT-In security audits and a zero-trust architecture.

The report also set out the cost and rules. The state will pay a maintenance fee of Rs 2,000 per mailbox each year, and any inbox not logged into for 45 consecutive days will be automatically deactivated. Employees who rarely check official mail may therefore need to log in regularly to keep their accounts active.

The Hitavada placed the decision in the context of a wider national shift. It said that in April 2026 the Centre told Parliament that 16.68 lakh official accounts had been moved to Zoho at a cost of Rs 180.10 crore, and that Zoho won a seven-year contract in 2023 after 20 security audits. These national figures are as reported by the newspaper and were not independently checked for this article.

The move follows similar steps at the Union level. The Tribune reported in October 2025 that the Union Ministry of Education had directed its officials to use Zoho tools such as Writer, Sheet and Show instead of Microsoft Office or Google Workspace, in what it described as a push for digital sovereignty, and that other ministries were expected to follow. That order, issued by an under secretary, is separate from the Madhya Pradesh decision, which covers email accounts across the state government.