Zoho Had a Chance to Change India’s Tech Future. It Didn’t

The scale of our achievement in changing how software is made and used is worth reminding ourselves about.

(Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

Over the past one year, at least 12 lakh email addresses of Central government employees, including those of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), have migrated from a National Informatics Centre-based system to a platform developed by the Chenna-based company, Zoho.

The government is undoubtedly correct that its fundamental communications infrastructure should not be in the hands of the multinational platform companies. Such dependency poses both privacy and national security risks and in the current geopolitical environment is especially undesirable. How the Government of India acts on that realisation will set important precedents for the 21st century public infrastructure.

But the announcement that they are already committed to a proprietary office suite, operated in non-government data centres of untested security by a single privately-held company owned primarily by two wealthy individuals, is unsound policy and raises a lot of questions.

Private vs Public

There might be good reasons for the government to put the operation of the data centres, which contain the information generated by government communications, in private hands. It might, however, also be preferable, particularly from a security point of view, for the government to decide instead to own and operate those facilities itself.

With respect to the software in use, however, for the government to choose to build such materials with private contractors from scratch or to use private contractors' proprietary parts is utterly wasteful. What is squandered is not only the public's money, but our ability as a society to lead the world.

Everything GoI needs for internal government communications—by email, instant message, voice and video conferencing, news notifications, etc—is currently available in high-security, highly-serviced distributions of software that everyone, everywhere can freely copy, modify, use and share without royalty charges or other restrictions. This is what we call the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).

In fact, in official policies, GoI has long since decided that it should always prefer open source software made under those legal principles.

This is in line with a global trend of moving away from American tech companies and asserting digital sovereignty. Germany and several other countries have already done it.

In the construction of basic government software systems such as these, that policy is a necessary component of national digital sovereignty.

Resisting digital colonialism is a very important part of the benefits that the government gets from the policy it has articulated.

Freeing the nation from dependence on foreign-controlled economic processes was fundamental to Indian independence in the 20th century, as it now is to the growth of a continually powerful independent India in the 21st. But for the very reasons that Mahatma Gandhi so deeply emphasised, self-development through self-production means not merely the replacement of one country's salt monopoly with another or one country's textile magnates for another country's billionaires.

What's Wrong with the Zoho Deal?

The human development consequences of our social and technological improvement are its most important benefit. By making what we need among ourselves, we are not merely providing for wealth to be concentrated in our oligarchies instead of someone else's. We are democratising knowledge and we are bringing peaceful and important technologies to the world.

That was the idea upon which Indian independence predicated its ability to overcome the economic might of the British empire, and it is the principle upon which we face a 21st century digital world now.

The Zoho deal is flawed because it puts the wrong parts of the process in the hands of private industry. Who operates the data centres is one matter. That is a decision which the government of the day is making under its political responsibility to get the best for the public's money.

Whatever it procures, national security demands that all components—hardware, software, and services—meet the most stringent world standards. Security is not "to be added," and all the software used must meet the same operating demands that the multinational corporates we are leaving behind purport to provide.

The business should be done as well as India can do it, and that should be as well as Google can do it, and at least as inexpensively. But the software should be made by everyone.

People-Made Tech

What does that actually mean in practical terms? The globe-spanning civil society that makes FOSS produces commodities. It makes software that everybody can use and can turn into other software. It proliferates what we have come to call "the cloud," which is essentially the culmination of the FOSS world's inventions. In that cloud of software, any program we make can be running on any computer, from supercomputers in massive data centers to single-board computers smaller than and less expensive than a mobile phone charger.

Any securely-encrypted data can be put in bulk storage, which is inexpensive to acquire on an absolutely competitive global market that is always on, always available, and will deliver it anywhere on the net, anywhere on earth anytime within milliseconds.

The scale of our achievement in changing how software is made and used is worth reminding ourselves about.

Earlier this year, the operating system called Debian, which is entirely made by volunteer editors out of freely available packages of carefully-audited software, shipped its 13th major version. It involved almost 2 billion lines of code in almost 70,000 software projects, all interacting perfectly, stable, maintained, and capable of running on every major computer architecture in the world today.

All of this is available for everybody to use in their own computers absolutely free without restriction,and everything in it is a part that everybody can reuse, improve, copy and share without limitation and without royalty.

That software includes everything needed by a governmental communications system which is secure and simple to scale from the needs of small offices, schools and enterprises to the full breadth of national government.

Free Software

Building from free parts would save time and cost. It would allow every small business and every Indian corporation to have copies of the same system for their own data centres or the old PC in the corner of the shop.

That would in turn provide the government with an unlimited reservoir of service support: young people in technology institutions—from engineering colleges to IITs—learning how to run, share and improve the software which government also uses.

Operating in secure and government-guaranteed facilities would allow the state to meet its own communications needs in a way which develops the people through the technology, along with the services government requires.

What is most unfortunate about this Zoho incident is its depressing absence of ambition, its failure to achieve a clear and already existing policy direction which is part of our bones as an independent society. Of course it is not too late. It is easy to imagine how to put together everything which is required and to have it run by anybody that the government chooses to have run it.

Existing policy should be followed, the fundamental philosophical importance of free software in the construction—not just of Indian government services but of democratic India and the great Indian people—should be honoured. Whatever the contracting environment in which government chooses to buy its services is, the people's money should be able to buy the global technology standard, and make Indian technology a beacon to the world.

(Mishi Choudhary is a technology lawyer and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center. Eben Moglen is Professor of Law and Legal history at Columbia University, and Director-Counsel and Chairman at the Software Freedom Law Center. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)