Amid tariff negotiations, IT Minister moves to Zoho for documents, presentations

Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Monday that he was shifting to the Tenkasi, Tamil Nadu-based Zoho’s software suite for preparing documents, slide show presentations and spreadsheets. “I am moving to Zoho — our own Swadeshi platform,” Mr. Vaishnaw said. The Minister “urged all to join the PM [Narendra Modi]’s call for Swadeshi by adopting Indian products and services (like Zoho),” an official said.

The Minister’s post on X, formerly Twitter, comes against the backdrop of trade negotiations with the United States, which has cumulatively imposed 50% tariffs on goods imported to the country from India. Mr. Vaishnaw has used Microsoft’s PowerPoint product for slideshow presentations in the past. The two largest office productivity software suite makers by market capitalisation — Microsoft and Google — are U.S. firms. Zoho has more than $1 billion in annual revenue and operates in multiple countries, with offices in the U.S.

“Many foreign items have unknowingly become part of daily life, and citizens often do not even realise whether the comb in their pocket is foreign or indigenous,” Mr. Modi said in his nationally televised address on Sunday, where he mostly spoke on the GST Council’s decision to rationalise the tax’s rate structure. Indians “need to liberate ourselves from such dependence and buy products that are Made in India, infused with the hard work and sweat of the country’s youth,” Mr. Modi added, pushing for buying “swadeshi” goods.

While the government hasn’t yet announced any moves to substantially move official software away from foreign software providers, it has moved to privatise some government-operated systems: Zoho, for instance, was given a contract last year to maintain email inboxes across several ministries. Zoho also won an IT Ministry-sponsored challenge to build a web browser that would depart from mainstream alternatives’ reluctance to trust security certificates issued by Indian companies. The browser has not been mandated for use as of yet within the government.

The reliance on firms like Microsoft has caused sanctions-related issues in the past: Nayara Energy, an Indo-Russian refinery firm, was briefly cut off from its own email systems after the U.S. firm stopped its services, saying it was complying with European sanctions against it. The company restored a day later.