Govt taps private sector to run staff email service, 2 pilot projects are on

The six companies are: Larsen & Toubro, Infosys, Softline, Zoho, Railtel and Rediffmail. While the seven-year contract will shortly be awarded — causing a migration from NICNET services and the @nic.in and @gov.in email services — two pilot projects are already running to test the efficacy of alternate email providers.

The Indian Express has learnt that the two companies currently running the email pilot programme are Microsoft Office 365 and Zoho, the cloud-based software company. While Microsoft is conducting its email testing services on 7,036 email users in the railways, Zoho is doing test runs on 6,825 email users in Ministries like MeitY, the Department of Technology and the NIC itself.

Confirming this, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar told The Indian Express that the migration of email services will factor in the sensitive nature of some Departments and Ministries. “This is a smart and necessary move. It is not practical for one organisation to handle all the Government’s digitalisation needs. Also, the Government cannot work in isolation in the absence of the trusted private sector and reputed technology start-ups. This is part of the new digital architecture.”

The RFP, issued by the Digital India Corporation (DIC), a new Department of MeitY, states what the Government was looking for was a “robust cloud-based email solution” for approximately 20 lakh email users with a provision to scale up to 50 lakh. According to the RFP, the contract envisages the migration of close to 3.3 million Government employees registered on NIC to an email service hosted on a secure cloud and “empower” the users with a range of office productivity tools including word processing, spreadsheets, presentation tools, along with collaboration tools and services such as video conferencing and chat.

As per the security provisions in the RFP, the cloud-based email solution must be hosted in India with no data centre/data processor located outside the boundaries of the country; no sharing of data, even on legal/statutory compulsions, without the permission of the purchaser (MeitY); use of AI models to detect phishing and notification of all malicious cyber-attacks to the Government’s cyber-security agencies. The email cloud contract is the second phase of the Government’s attempt to rope in the private IT sector, the first being the initiative to enhance NIC’s existing cloud capacity. That Rs 350-crore contract, also for seven years, was awarded to Jio Platforms Limited (JPL) earlier this year. It is learnt that JPL is to “deliver” the project by August end for acceptance testing with October as an operational deadline.