Digital India Bhashini (2022) : Bridging India’s Language Divide Through Multilingual Innovation

Policy Update
Varalika Raizada

INTRODUCTION

India is the world’s most linguistically rich nation, with over 1,200 languages and over 19,500 dialects spoken across its expanse. Its rich linguistic diversity is not only an expression of cultural diversity but also a crucial aspect of identity. The Constitution of India officially recognizes 22 languages under the Eighth Schedule, and each has its own distinct literature, history, and socio-political weight. Yet, with this diversity comes challenges in communication, governance, and digital inclusion. Closing these linguistic divides is crucial to inclusive development and digital empowerment for all citizens — a vision that India’s Bhashini initiative aims to fulfill through the use of technology.

Bhashini, or Bhasha Interface for India, is a revolutionary initiative that is democratizing access to digital content and services across India’s diverse linguistic spread. This National Language Translation Mission (NLTM), in alignment with the Digital India program, aims to foster digital inclusivity and empowerment.

Launched in 2022, the Bhashini translation mission is implemented by the Digital India Bhashini Division (DIBD) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). Bhashini aims to transcend the language barriers to bridge language and digital divides and promote inclusivity. Bhashini presents a “Voice-First” multilingual solution and the largest co-creation AI platform to drive collaboration and innovation and enable access to digital services in multiple Indian languages.

VISION AND MISSION

Bhashini embodies Digital India’s vision of transforming India into a digitally empowered society. By addressing linguistic diversity, it is promoting digital inclusion, enabling citizens to access essential services like education, healthcare, and governance in their preferred language.

Bhashini’s vision is to harness natural language technologies to enable a diverse ecosystem of contributors, partnering entities, and citizens to transcend language barriers and ensure digital inclusion and empowerment. This initiative materializes the aspiration of a digitally unified nation where linguistic diversity is celebrated. Its establishment underscores the nation’s commitment to ensuring that technology bridges linguistic divides and becomes a powerful tool for inclusivity.

OBJECTIVES

To achieve its vision, Bhashini has established the following key objectives:

Developing a long-term strategy for sustainable Indian language technology (ILT), solutions and ecosystem technology
Adoption of Indian technology and solutions for easier access to the internet
Growth of Indian language content and technology of the internet
Harnessing economies of scale in Indian language technologies, solutions, applications, data sets and AI models
Enabling research in Indian language technologies
Encouraging, enabling and incentivising transfer of technologies (ToT)
Promoting and facilitating Indigenous intellectual property (IP) generation
Enabling collaborations and partnerships with national and international agencies
Catalysing collaborative research, commercialization awareness and capacity building

PRODUCTS AND SERVICES UNDER BHASHINI

Anuvaad: web service to facilitate text translation
Chitraanuvaad: an AI-based open-source platform to perform video translations
Lekhaanuvaad: AI-powered service for document translation and digitization
Bhashini translation plugin: web translation plugin
Bhashini WTMC: advanced AI-powered website translation plugin to translate content between English and 22 Bharatiya languages
Vannianuvaad: real-time speech-to-speech translation for Bhartiya languages

APPLICATION OF BHASHINI

Bhashini has so far been adopted across different sectors and industries

Citizen service: Grievance redressal mechanism, Pehchan app, Askdisha, National Train Enquiry System, UIDAI (my Aadhaar portal)
Justice system: SVP police Academy, Nyaya Setu chatbot (Department of Justice), NCRB, Ministry of Home Affairs, India, International Arbitration Center
Outreach: Ministry of Panchayati Raj, Mann ki Baat
Development: multilingual E-Gram swaraj portal, Janmnrega app, National Social Assistance Program, PM Kisan chatbot, Kisan e-Mitra
Fintech: Federal bank, voice-based banking, RBI innovation hub, NPCI voice-based payments
Governance: e-office, Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs, Survey of India
Education: National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), Sign assistive app, multilingual, social and emotional learning courses.

Some of the examples of the application of Bhashini are-

All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the University Grant Commission (UGC) have leveraged the Anuvaadini app to translate books, including technical textbooks, for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in multiple Indian languages, which are available on the e-KUMBH portal.

The Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances and Bhashini have collaborated to launch a multimodal multilingual solution to ease the lodging of grievances for the public and enhance accessibility and navigation on the CPGRAMS portal (PIB, 2025e). The multimodal multilingual solution of NextGen’s central public grievance redress and monitoring system is expected to go live by July 2025.

Lok Sabha Secretariat and MeitY have signed an MoU to launch Sansad Bhashini for AI-powered multilingual parliamentary operations (PIB, 2025b). This initiative is to revolutionise parliamentary documentation and accessibility through real-time translations by enabling MPs, researchers, and academia to access vast archives of parliamentary debates and records in multiple languages.

The Maha Kumbh 2025 celebrations amassed a massive gathering of pilgrims from diverse linguistic backgrounds, which presented a unique logistical and communication challenge. Amidst this diversity, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) leveraged Bhashini for seamless communication, navigation assistance and accessibility for all by providing multilingual facilities. Bhashini facilitated the provision of crucial information through the translation of announcements, event schedules and safety guidelines into 11 languages (PIB, 2025c).

To simplify navigation for the pilgrims, mobile applications and kiosks integrated with speech-to-text and text-to-speech tools, and multilingual chat bots like Kumbh Sah‘AI’yak. In collaboration with UP police, Bhashini’s CONVERSE feature supported multilingual access to UP 112 helplines and emergency services (PIB, 2025a). Bhashini lost and found was a key feature, enabling visitors to register lost and found items using voice inputs in native languages and voice translation to simplify interactions.

Tripura is the first northeast state to sign an MOU with Bhashini for multilingual governance (PIB, 2025d). This is significant since many citizens of Tripura face challenges due to language barriers. Bhashini integrates with existing systems like CM Helpline, e-Vidhan and e-districts to enable multilingual communication, supported by the Digital India Bhashini Division (DIBD)

BENEFITS AND KEY ACHIEVEMENTS

Bhashini is a game changer for India’s multilingual population and digital inclusion goals. It enables a large majority of non-English speakers to participate as digital citizens in the rising digital economy and e-governance initiatives.

Additionally, it helps digitally preserve the Indian language heritage, cultural diversity, and identity. It encourages the creation of vernacular content ecosystems and the availability of regional content online. It empowers citizens, especially those with low literacy or elderly populations, in their native language to interact with apps using voice to avail varied citizen services. Overall, this initiative catalyzes research in Indian NLP and AI innovation. Some of its key achievements include

Bhashini has successfully crossed the 100 million monthly inferences threshold, demonstrating its reach and impact.
Over 50+ stakeholders, including prominent government bodies and private security partners, have collaborated with Bhashini.
The bashing-powered mobile apps have been downloaded more than 500,000 times.
Bhashini currently supports over 100 diverse use cases, showcasing accessibility across diverse industries and sectors.
The Bhashini platform hosts over 300 AI-based language models, investing in the development of state-of-the-art solutions in the AI language technology space.

CHALLENGES AND GAPS

1. Language and dialect diversity: There are 22 officially recognised languages and thousands of dialects. Low-resource languages like Bodo, Santali, and Kodava are hard to translate and build accurate NLP models.

2. Quality of Machine Translation: Ensuring high-quality translation is challenging. Translation accuracy, especially for complex or context-heavy texts, accents and dialects, is often difficult and can lead to semantic loss or mistranslation

3. Technical infrastructure: despite initiatives to digitally cover the whole of India. Many parts of India still lack reliable internet connectivity, access to digital platforms, and digital literacy. Another issue is device compatibility; not all users have resource-intensive language tech smartphones.

4. Data collection and privacy: Using open data sources for training NLP models lacks standardization or quality control. Crowdsourced voice and text data can raise privacy and consent issues. Also, there’s a need for stronger collaboration with linguists, native speakers, and educators.

CONCLUSION

Bhashini is a key initiative in the Digital India mission and seeks to overcome the language barrier in as diverse a country as India. By facilitating real-time translation, speech recognition, and access to different Indian languages, it enables millions of citizens to interact meaningfully with digital services using their mother tongue.

Although it is challenged by factors like scarcity of resources for low-digital languages, non-uniform accuracy of translation, and infrastructural gaps, its implications are broad. Ranging from increasing digital inclusion and aiding e-governance to advancing AI innovation and safeguarding linguistic heritage, Bhashini can transform India’s multilingual digital environment. The future will hold success only through continued community interaction, effective public-private partnerships, and inclusive policy mechanisms that facilitate equal access to all.

REFERENCES

Press Information Bureau. (2025a, January 16). BHASHINI: Transforming Maha Kumbh through Multilingual Innovation. Government of India. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=2093333
Press Information Bureau. (2022, May 24). MeitY holds Brainstorming with Researchers & Startups to shape strategy for Digital India BHASHINI – India’s AI led language translation platform. Government of India. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1827997
Press Information Bureau. (2025b, March 18). LOK SABHA SECRETARIAT AND MEITY SIGN MoU TO LAUNCH ‘SANSAD BHASHINI’ FOR AI-POWERED MULTILINGUAL PARLIAMENTARY OPERATIONS. Government of India. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2112542
Press Information Bureau. (2025c, January 14). Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s Bhashini providing multilingual access at Mahakumbh Prayagraj 2025 in 11 languages. Government of India. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=2092739
Press Information Bureau. (2025d, January 28). Tripura becomes first North East State to sign MoU with Bhashini for Multi-lingual Governance. Government of India. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2096998
Press Information Bureau. (2025e, March 28). DARPG and Bhashini collaborate together to launch a multimodal multilingual solution for citizens for filing grievances. Government of India. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2116333
https://www.digitalindia.gov.in/initiative/digital-india-bhashini-2/
https://bhashini.gov.in/en

About the contributor– Varalika Raizada is a Research intern at IMPRI.
Acknowledgement– The author extends her sincere gratitude to Aasthaba Jadeja and fellow interns, who provided guidance throughout the process.

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.