Context
The Digital India BHASHINI Division and Kathmandu University have recently entered into a partnership to enhance cooperation in multilingual AI, language technology, and digital public infrastructure.
About Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD)
- Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) functions under the Digital India Corporation (DIC) of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
- It is India’s flagship initiative for enabling multilingual access to digital services through AI and language technologies.
- Through the National Hub for Language Technology (NHLT), it provides speech and text-based AI solutions in multiple Indian languages for governance, public services, and institutional use.
- The BHASHINI platform makes AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools accessible to startups, MSMEs, researchers, and individual innovators.
- It promotes multilingual AI research, open-source innovation, dataset development, startup enablement, and academic collaboration, strengthening India’s digital public infrastructure ecosystem.
- The platform supports 36 Indian text languages, 23 Indian voice languages, and 35 international languages, enabling wider linguistic accessibility.
- It powers over 800 government websites and processes more than 15 million AI inferences daily, facilitating seamless multilingual service delivery.
- By overcoming language barriers, BHASHINI promotes inclusive access to digital services and strengthens citizen-centric governance.
