India's IT minister said yesterday he was abandoning current word processing, spreadsheet and presentation apps to adopt locally built alternatives from Zoho, urging India's 1,4 billion people to do the same.
“I’m moving to Zoho – our Swadeshi platform for documents, spreadsheets and presentations,” the minister wrote. The word Swadeshi, from Sanskrit and Bengali, describes self-sufficiency.
Zoho is an Indian software development company that offers a huge range of productivity tools and business applications, which it provides mainly as SaaS and sells in packages at very low prices, an approach that has helped it gain over 100 million users. The company also won a competition to create a browser, which the Indian government recommended citizens adopt.
In a video he posted on X , Vainshaw said that Zoho's products are "amazing."
“I am so impressed with the capabilities of Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheets, and Zoho Presentation,” he added.
In the minister's post, he "urges everyone to join" Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent appeal to Indians to adopt indigenous products and services.
The appeal was made in a speech on Sunday , in which the country's prime minister said: "Many foreign things have become part of our daily lives and we don't even know it."
“We don’t even know whether the comb in our pocket is foreign or Indian,” he added. “We should get rid of these too. We should buy goods made in India… Say with pride that this is Swadeshi, say with pride, I buy Swadeshi, I also sell Swadeshi products, this should become the attitude of every Indian.”
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
