Editorial: Swadeshi meets symbolism

• After giving a modest push to developing a homegrown sovereign Artificial Intelligence ecosystem, the government has turned its attention to adopting an indigenous email with a high-profile endorsement of Zoho Mail by Union Home Minister Amit Shah. What followed is the now-familiar social media orchestration led by the party’s top brass, the somewhat infamous party IT cell, and a swarm of enthusiastic acolytes, followed by all and sundry falling in line, announcing its adoption. As a result, besides ministers, party leaders, and over 12 lakh government employees, including those from the PMO, migrated from the government’s NIC to Zoho mail. The company has reported a staggering spike of 150 times, thanks to the government’s munificence.

It sometimes becomes difficult to separate the grain from the chaff when it comes to anything that the government aggressively hardsells with a coordinated publicity blitzkrieg. The raison d'être behind the government’s move to promote Zoho Mail is obvious. It can be presented as a symbolic step towards self-reliance and digital sovereignty. Moreover, the product was developed by a pro-government, foreign-returned, patriotic technocrat’s company. The carefully crafted social media exchange between Amit Shah and Sridhar Vembu, founder of Zoho and who now dons the role of chief scientist to focus on the company’s R&D initiatives, had all the keywords – faith in hardworking engineers who stayed in India because they believed, and Jai Hindi and Jai Bharat. This move will definitely boost the morale of party supporters among techies, possibly be a shot in the arm for tech startups that harbour dreams of developing world-class products instead of peddling IT services based on labour arbitrage arising out of lower Indian labour costs. It will also bolster the party’s messaging on pet swadeshi themes like Make in India, Atmanirbhar Bharat, Digital India, self-reliance, and a somewhat hyperbolic David versus Goliath narrative. That is, a tech company from an aspiring superpower-in-the-making “giving global tech companies a run for their money”.

Undoubtedly, a cause worthy of pursuit and wide support.

However, a reality check needs to be done. Zoho’s low-cost product is built mainly for small and medium enterprises. It is going to be challenging to swiftly scale and ramp up the product, digital infrastructure, and capacity to meet the unprecedented demand. Secondly, over a decade, Zoho products have matured, but reviews continue to be mixed, especially in comparison with similar products by global giants Google and Microsoft that have set the global standards. Constructive criticism from well-meaning people abounds on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit, indicating the existence of shortcomings that are typical of an evolving product. There’s merit in the complaints of discerning, tech-savvy users that Zoho products are still “janky”. The company is taking the feedback in the right spirit and trying to address the issues. The company’s intent and zeal to do so can be circumscribed by time and technology constraints. Also, the transition from B2B to the B2B-B2C model.

At the heart of the problem is the asymmetry in competition and scale, which adversely impacts R&D spending on and time needed for product development and service, and what complicates the issue is the typically Indian “jugaad” attitude, reverse engineering to create copycat products, and generally, quality being proportional to affordable or “cheap” price. Despite the government and right-wing ecosystem’s support, Indian microblogging app Koo failed. Zoho has better chances of doing well if it does not fall for the hype.