Article by Anirudh Dinesh: “Only last week, the state government of Madhya Pradesh signed(opens in new window) a partnership with Digital India’s Bhashini Division(opens in new window) (DIBD) to integrate multilingual AI tools across the state’s digital governance platforms. The agreement, formalized at a regional AI conference in the capital city Bhopal, aims to enable citizens to interact with public services in their own languages rather than defaulting to English or Hindi.
While most mainstream AI systems are trained primarily on English and optimized for English-speaking contexts, the Bhashini division is building infrastructure specifically designed for linguistic diversity – treating language access not as an afterthought but as foundational to building inclusive AI. This is part of a broader movement in India around building Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) shaped(opens in new window) by openness, accessibility, and inclusion.
Bhashini(opens in new window), short for “BHASHa INterface for India”, was launched by Prime Minister Modi in 2022. It is a platform that treats language access as public infrastructure exposed through standardized APIs, combining translation across all 22 constitutionally recognized Indian languages, speech recognition, and text-to-speech tools that developers, governments, and nonprofits can use freely.
Crowdsourced Translations: BhashaDaan
Modern AI learns from vast quantities of data. But for many Indian languages, such as Konkani and Bodo, that data does not exist digitally. BhashaDaan(opens in new window) means “Language Donation.”..(More)”
