The Indian government just moved two million email accounts off NIC's servers onto Zoho's cloud. 

The reason the government decided to leave behind a system it had built and run for 40 years? A list of issues; including ransomware attacks, power outages, and even a blackout on a New Year's Eve that knocked out Parliament's website.

The fix was a seven-year, 200 crore rupee contract with a private Indian company. Zoho actually scored lower than Google and Microsoft in the government's own assessment. Bur it won the assessment anyway.

Thing is, India spent years building open-source infrastructure to stay independent. The question is whether it just traded one dependency for another.

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